Posterity has not so much neglected Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924) as derived malicious satisfaction from ostentatiously yawning in his face. Late Victorian and Edwardian Englishmen, in whose estimate he ranked with the greatest modern composers, would have thought such a development grotesque. Yet the astonishing fact remains: Paul J. Rodmell’s is the first detailed biography of Stanford, indeed—save for a chatty, somewhat anodyne, repeatedly inaccurate 1935 encomium—the first Stanford biography of any kind. (A second, from Oxford University Press, appeared in January 2003.) At least England has done Stanford belated homage. His native Ireland appears to have forgotten his very existence, although no one should underestimate the problems involved in selling an uncommunicative, virtuous, sardonic Protestant Anglophile to the Mary Robinson market.
Even in his own lifetime Stanford suffered from being repeatedly bracketed with Sir Hubert Parry, rival and colleague at London’s Royal College of Music. This ill-advised yoking typifies that critical laziness which so often has welded together the most disparate musicians in spurious alliances (Debussyravel, Donizettibellini, Sibeliusnielsen). In truth, Stanford and Parry felt for the most part a gentlemanly mutual dislike, unsurprising to those who knew both. Stanford’s outlook bore the same relationship to Parry’s which Macaulay’s bore to Gladstone’s; it possessed, in other words, enough eighteenth-century realism to debar him from Parry’s tendencies toward nebulous demagogic uplift.
Really, the two men shared only one artistic trait: an itch that flared up at the very sight of blank manuscript paper. Both were far too prolific for their own good, and while Stanford—unlike Parry—never voiced a willingness to set the whole Bible to music, he tackled all genres then prevalent, leaving in total more than 200 pieces. Of these, all but a dozen are now entirely overlooked. The dozen heard occasionally are, at their strongest, good enough to prompt curiosity about what their hordes of unremembered siblings might sound like: curiosity sharpened by Rodmell’s scrupulous, sometimes tart analyses (he deems one operatic juvenilium “embarrassing”). Stanford’s Irish Rhapsodies brought a new, if faint, note of exotic color to orchestras’ repertoire; his finest unaccompanied motets, such as Beati quorum via, attain neo-Brucknerian sublimity; and a few solo songs, notably A Soft Day, stand not far below their best German and French counterparts. Yet what an alarming disproportion between Stanford’s efforts, and his lasting fame! Hibernian chauvinists, as Rodmell demonstrates, ascribed Stanford’s frequent stylistic blandness to insufficient wearing of the green. A likelier explanation is sheer fatigue, since he churned the stuff out too fast to care overmuch about whether it would echo down the ages.
The consensus is that Stanford, whatever his creative timidity, showed consistent genius in his Royal College of Music teaching. Certainly he acquired an impressive roll-call of pupils: including Holst, Vaughan Williams, Frank Bridge, Eugene Goossens, Herbert Howells, and Arthur (Jamaican Rumba) Benjamin. He trained the British Empire’s future composers, much as contemporary civil servants like Lionel Curtis were training the Empire’s future administrators. Almost every imperial outpost, however arid, contained at least one Stanford student taking up the white man’s burden of instructing lesser musical breeds. (From 1933 to 1956 the New South Wales Conservatorium’s directorship stayed uninterruptedly in these students’ hands.) Much of Stanford’s pedagogic charm sprang from his fierce Dublin brogue, which he prob- ably exaggerated for histrionic effect. Tyros whose course-work annoyed him would elicit shouts of “All rot, me bhoy” and “This is damned ugly, me bhoy.” One neophyte’s submissions, by their Teutonic insipidities, moved him to comment “All Brahms and water, me bhoy, and more water than Brahms”: a verdict applicable, it seems, to a fair proportion of Stanford’s own output. (Meanwhile Stanford retained Cambridge’s music professorship, but continued to live in London, protesting with laudable candor that on his income-tax-ravaged Cambridge pittance he neither could nor would keep up collegiate appearances.)
It is too bad that Stanford, having long championed Elgar, should have received from the greater artist—five years Stanford’s junior—ferocious scorn. Admittedly Stanford’s innate exuberance guaranteed toe-curling conversational indiscretions: though he took rather guilty pleasure in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, he privately complained that it “stinks of incense,” and naturally the gibe reached Elgar. But whereas the undiplomatic Stanford repeatedly regretted his incautious tongue, the equally undiplomatic Elgar collected grievances (real or imagined) with a lapidarist’s devotion, and afterwards exhibited considerable relish in elaborate belittlement of Stanford while giving a public lecture. When Lady Elgar died in 1920, Stanford attended her funeral. Before tears overcame him, he urged a friend: “Tell Elgar I had to come … tell him how sorry I am and that I just felt I must come.” Elgar responded to Stanford’s attempt at peacemaking with a vindictive snub that Rodmell rightly quotes:
I only regard it as a cruel piece of impertinence… . As to his wanting to show respect and the like, I do not believe a word of it and never shall do: it was a mere political trick.
Which discord killed all hopes for a rapprochement. There is pleasure in noting that, though life estranged them, death partly reconciled them: Stanford now reposes in Westminster Abbey, where Elgar has a memorial tablet.
