STANFORD
AND THE PIANO
This
year Promenade audiences heard
for the first time, 92
years after a planned performance
that fell through, the Second
Piano Concerto by Charles Villiers
Stanford (1852-1924). Additionally,
a CD is being issued entitled
Land
of Sunset
Glories
and played by the present writer,
offering a sequence of the composer’s
solo piano music, most of it not
previously recorded. details
This seems a good occasion to
examine Stanford’s relationship
to the piano more fully than programme
or booklet notes allow.
1.
Training in Dublin
Musically-aware
Dubliners in the early 1860s might
have already predicted a musical
career for Stanford. We may wonder,
however, whether they would have
foreseen a pianist or a composer.
While not yet ten he presented
a tasteful if hardly virtuosic
programme of Beethoven, Handel,
Mendelssohn, Moscheles, Mozart
and Bach. A longer and
more demanding programme about
two years later drew the comment:
… Master Charles V. Stanford …is
doubtless destined for a great
position in the musical world
… a listener alone of whatever
experience, not knowing of the
youth, or seeing the performer
would suppose an artist at the
instrument who had passed through
years of mature study, neatness
and precision, elastic touch,
expression and finish seem to
have been bestowed by nature in
this case, for Master Stanford
plays with his head as well as
with his hands”.
On
this occasion Stanford not only
played solo music by Beethoven,
Heller, Hummel, Bach, Dussek and
Weber but also accompanied a couple
of songs and joined in a performance
of the Haydn G major Trio. Moreover,
one of the songs was a composition
of his own. From the previous
year, in fact, it had become quite
a feature of Dublin
musical life to find a piece by
the young Stanford slipped into
even quite important programmes. So our musically-aware
Dubliner may well have backed
the composer against the pianist
even then.
Nevertheless,
Stanford continued to appear regularly
as a pianist in his role as conductor
and general animator of the Cambridge
University Music Society for twenty
years beginning from the end of
1872. He rarely played as soloist but was dedicated
to chamber music and seems to
have coped easily enough with
the frequently demanding piano
parts of the new German school.
Contemporaneously, he was organist
at Trinity
College, Cambridge.
After 1892 he still occasionally
accompanied his songs in public.
Stanford’s
first piano lessons were with
his mother but the most lasting
influence on his approach to the
piano was his godmother, Elizabeth
Meeke, a Moscheles pupil whom
he recalled as “an admirable amateur
pianist”. Stanford’s quite detailed
account of her method has considerable
bearing on the way in which he
subsequently wrote for the piano,
and how we should play his piano
music, and is worth quoting at
length:
She always held that a beautiful
touch was a gift, which can be
developed by careful training
but cannot be manufactured by
machinery; and that the safest
way of fostering it was one widely
different from that in vogue at
the present day. She believed
in making the player sit a sufficient
height to keep the upper line
of the forearm absolutely straight
to the first joint of the fingers,
the end of the fingers falling
like little hammers upon the keys.
To get command of the instrument,
the player therefore had to sit
up to his work. Nowadays they
sit below it. This in my experience,
leads to banging and forcing the
tone, and I confess that I seldom
now hear the velvety quality which
used to distinguish her playing
and that of others of her time
who carried out the same plan.
It may be that the fault lies
at the door of the modern pianoforte;
and that, like the race between
guns and armour, the finger force
has had to give way to fist force,
in order to make an impression
on the latest types of battleship
grand. Noise versus sonority.
As the superficial imitators of
Wagner’s instrumentation so often
attain a plethora of the former
[undoubtedly a dig at Richard
Strauss], so do the quasi-disciples
of Liszt and of Rubinstein. It
is the age of the hit instead
of the pressure. If it
is old-fashioned to prefer the
pressure, I am happy to be still
in the ranks of the out-of-date.
I shall always prefer beauty of
tone to strength of muscle.
Stanford
develops this point with his recollections
of Liszt who, with Anton Rubinstein,
he found the supreme purveyor
of tonal beauty. This passage
may still be pondered by present-day
interpreters of Liszt, as well
as of Stanford himself.
When Liszt raised his arms above
his head, he did so, to be frank,
simply to make a theatrical display
which would catch the eyes of
the audience. He was quite capable
of showing off, with his tongue
in his cheek. … A careful observer
of his playing would have noticed
that no matter how high was the
upward lift of his arms, the downward
fall was always in time to allow
of his hands being in the same
position to strike the keys as
if the brachial flourish had not
been made at all. To hit the key
from a height would be to risk
wrong notes and damage to the
instrument. It was magnificent
but it was humbug. Liszt knew
it; he always played for musicians
with an immovable body and a quiet
repressed dignity, reserving his
acrobatic performances for audiences
whom he in his heart despised.
The
virtues of Meeke’s teaching were
revealed when Stanford played
for Sigismund Thalberg in 1862:
The one trick which he warned me
against, one which I had picked
up during my old teacher’s absence
from Dublin when I had been placed
in other hands, was that of raising
my wrist above the flat level
of my hand as I struck a note.
“If you go on doing that you will
thump,” said T. I felt a little
inclined to giggle inwardly, for
the teacher who had encouraged
this very failing was standing
beside me, and I knew quite well
that she did thump mightily.
The
“other hands” could possibly have
been those of Henrietta Flynn,
another Moscheles pupil with whom
Stanford studied briefly. He recalls
only that she was
a curious, clever and somewhat eccentrically
clothed lady … She gave lessons
in all weathers with very short
sleeves and a muff in which she
kept a powder puff for frequent
use. … Miss Flynn had a most unholy
affection for the works of Dussek,
and, however good his music may
be for the developing technique,
I got so sick of them that I put
them in a back drawer as fast
as I learned them.
The
Stanford family spent the summer
of 1862 in London,
where the budding musician had
a few lessons from Ernst Pauer,
whose arrangements and editions
still crop up in second-hand shops.
Pauer had been a pupil of Mozart’s
second son, Franz Xaver Wolfgang,
and Stanford simply recalls that
the lessons were “principally
in Mozart”.
Stanford’s
final teacher in Dublin
was a third Moscheles pupil, Michael
Quarry. Possibly Quarry judged
that Stanford’s technique was
by now as good as needs be, for
it seems they just got on and
played:
He opened my eyes to Schumann, whose
music I had never seen; to the
choral works of Bach, and to Brahms.
We spent hours over four-hand
arrangements of the Serenades,
the Sextets, and the Hungarian
Dances; and he taught me the Handel
Variations, and even the D minor
Concerto. It was a new world which
opened to my eyes, when I first
read the score of the St. Matthew
Passion, which till then had never
penetrated to Ireland.
There
is no evidence that Stanford sought
any further piano lessons. According
to his friend and admittedly partial
first biographer Plunket Greene,
these early lessons remained with
him:
Stanford’s touch was the most delicious
thing imaginable, impossible to
define. It had a sweetness which
gave one a lump in one’s throat;
a beauty which pervaded every
note of the whole and a sparkle
which made one chuckle. It never
varied in this respect and seemed
inviolate in crabbed passages,
fifth-rate pianofortes, or moods
of irritation. He never practiced
in later life, and yet it was
just as beautiful till the day
of his death. His playing was
just as unself-conscious as himself,
his hands just following the colours
of his joyous humorous imagination.
He always said that it was to
Quarry that he owed whatever he
was as a pianist.
This
last statement does not seem quite
consistent with Stanford’s own
memories. On the other hand, it
has the ring of inside knowledge.
So, too, does the following account
of the infectious interplay between
Stanford and his friend Raoul
de Versan under Quarry’s aegis:
[Quarry] gave the boys the run of
his rooms and when work was done
he let them “rag” to their hearts’
content. They played anything
that came into their heads, and
improvised and larked and let
their spirits run wild. Music
to them became an exuberant expression
of fun and happiness. They appeared
at tableaux vivants in
grotesque masks and made up duets
on the popular tunes of the day
as they came into their heads,
and the more thoroughly they played
the fool the fresher they came
back to harness.
2.
Stanford and improvisation
This
account of Stanford the improviser
is worth following up. The relationship
between composers and improvisers
is worth a treatise in itself.
Some of the greatest composers
– Mozart and Beethoven in particular
– impressed their contemporaries
in the latter role almost as much
in the former. More privately,
quite a few would ease themselves
into compositional vein by doodling
on the piano. Famously, Elgar
was sufficiently intrigued by
this process in himself to set
a few improvisations down on disc.
Stanford himself brooked no intrusions
into his private life. One imagines
him going straight to his desk
and penning the music almost as
fast as it came into his head,
without preliminaries, but this
is only surmise. Just one piece
among his piano works, the Ballade
in G minor, op.170, convincingly
suggests that it may have been
improvised first and then written
down with minimal tidying up.
Stanford usually manages to give
his pieces an air of spontaneity
but here the somewhat cadenza-like
progress of the music and sectional
construction sound as if made
up on the spur of the moment.
Whereas the intimate musings of
the other Ballade, in F
op.148/2, if far from predictable
in their twists and turns, seem
more obviously subject to formal
control.
But
in fact, Stanford had quite definite
ideas about improvising. In his
treatise, Musical Composition,
the chapter entitled “Danger Signals”
included “The danger of improvising
without method”:
This is a fascinating amusement,
which can have dire results. It
is the sworn foe of power of construction,
and the ally of slipshod workmanship.
It aids and abets that most undesirable
method of composing, writing at
the pianoforte. …
Nine-tenths of the ideas, no matter
how beautiful they may be, which
a composer may invent in improvisation,
are forgotten as soon as they
are played. They are a waste of
substance, valuable products of
the brain, which throws them away
as fast as it creates them. To
improvise with method has
a certain value of its own. It
needs a sense of balance, in order
to keep the movement clear in
design, and a long and accurate
memory to insure the exact repetitions
of the themes. But it is only
a rare genius who can fulfil these
conditions without a long previous
experience of writing at the table,
using his eyes as his ears.
From
Plunket Greene we learn, however,
that Stanford could sometimes
be persuaded to go to the piano,
impromptu, for the amusement of
his friends.
Nothing that Stanford ever composed
showed that “playboy” side of
his character like the set of
“Limericks” which on rare occasions
he was persuaded to play and sing
himself. So far as we know he
never wrote them down – the MSS.
have never been found. … He was always
made to sing them himself, and
then only when the surroundings
were thoroughly congenial. It
was a side of him quite unfamiliar
to most people, but one which
showed him at his very best. If
only some of those nervous pupils
could have seen him at the pianoforte,
his mind dictating the imagery
and his fingers reproducing it
like magic! It was imagination
made vocal ….
Improvisation
is, of course, particularly associated
with Stanford’s “other” instrument,
the organ. No account of him actually
doing so seems to have come down
to us, though we do know that
he liked to extemporise transcriptions
of orchestral works.
3.
Modern pianos, modern pianists
A
little more remains to be said.
As Stanford himself admits, the
piano itself was considerably
revolutionised during his lifetime.
As I well remember from an 1870s
Broadwood grand to which I had
access in my schooldays and which
was virtually a fortepiano, piano
construction in Great Britain
lingered behind the times. Stanford
would already have found more
solidly sonorous instruments when
he went to study in Leipzig
and Berlin.
The Steinways of the early years
of the 20th century
established the modern piano as
we know it, call them “battleship
grands” if he would. And performers
in their turn adapted their techniques
to the bigger instrument. This
again, Stanford admitted. Since
his autobiography and his other
writings concentrate on his earlier,
pre-1900, years, we really have
no certainty as to his feelings
about any specific pianists of
the modern school. Nevertheless,
four internationally renowned
pianists in particular, whom recordings
show to have mastered the “battleship
grand” without resorting to “fist
power”, crossed his path and left
their traces on his music.
The
first of these was Percy Grainger,
whom Stanford promptly nicknamed
“Polar Bear” and who played the
Concert Variations upon an
English Theme op.71 for piano
and orchestra under Stanford’s
baton in 1904. In
1905 Grainger made virtuoso transcriptions
of Stanford’s recent Irish
Dances op.89 and performed
two of them at the Wigmore Hall.
The two appeared together in Grieg’s
Piano Concerto in 1905 and again
in 1907 when the Norwegian composer’s
untimely death prevented his planned
performance at the Leeds Festival. Also in 1904,
Stanford composed his Three
Rhapsodies op.92 on subjects
from Dante for Grainger.
Grainger
was noted, among much else, for
a rewriting of the Grieg Concerto
which, while not changing the
notes, divided them differently
between the hands to make use,
wherever possible, of a particular
technical speciality of his: brilliant
martellato octaves with
alternating hands. His Irish
Dances transcriptions also
make merry with this effect. At
the very least, Stanford must
have been intrigued by it. Not
surprisingly he inserted several
examples in the “Dante Rhapsodies”
but thereafter it remained a part
of his pianistic armoury. Of the pieces
included in Land
of Sunset
Glories,
the late Waltz in D minor
op.178/2 opens with a striking
example.
One
would not, a priori, have
expected Stanford to have much
time for Rachmaninov, but he conducted
the Second Concerto with an RCM
student in 1908 and again with
Rachmaninov himself at the 1910
Leeds Festival. As commentators
have pointed out down the years,
the impression made on Stanford
by Rachmaninov’s opening device
– without the introductory chords,
though – is reported almost too
faithfully in his own Second Concerto,
also in C minor, op.126 (1911).
Thereafter, it must be said, the
piano writing reveals little or
nothing that was not already present
in the earlier Concert Variations
(1898) and Stanford seems chiefly
concerned to translate the Russian’s
louring tone into a Celtic brew
of his own.
Stanford
had hoped to have his new Concerto
premiered by Moritz Rosenthal,
whom he had admired since his
first appearance in London
in 1895. Possibly arguing that
flattery gets you everywhere,
in 1912 he dedicated his Six
Characteristic Pieces op.132
to Rosenthal. In reality there
was no need to grease Rosenthal’s
palm since he was more than ready
to perform the Concerto, though
in the event he never did so. This work
got off to an unlucky start, in
fact, and eventually had its premičre
in 1915 by Harold Bauer in Norfolk,
Connecticut (USA).
The
first British performance in December
1916 introduces the fourth pianist
on our list, Benno Moiseiwitsch,
who played it in Bournemouth
under Stanford’s direction. A
further performance took place
in Oxford in 1918 before it finally
reached London in 1919, where
Moiseiwitsch gave it at a Royal
Philharmonic Society concert under
Geoffrey Toye. This spurt of activity
over a work now several years
old seems to have driven Stanford
to write a third Concerto, of
which he only completed a short
score, maybe with the idea of
arousing Moiseiwitsch’s interest.
Though
less of a name today, Stanford’s
former composition pupil Harold
Samuel should perhaps be added
to this list. He was noted for
his Bach and was appropriately
the dedicatee of Stanford’s second
set of Twenty-Four Preludes
op.179 (1920), some of which he
performed in public.
4.
Stanford’s treatment of the piano
Thus
far the historical side. When
we approach the music itself,
it may be helpful to remember
that Stanford was the child of
earlier, lighter pianos. Nevertheless,
most of his piano music was written
well into the age of the modern
piano, to which he made concessions,
but not consistently. So if we
find the writing of the Ballade
in F op.148/2 (1917) strangely spare
for what is at heart a highly
romantic piece, if we think the
episodes in the Roundel
op.132/4 (1912) or the more intimate
meditations of the Caprice
in D minor op.136/2 (1913) court
blandness in their cool a capella
writing, then we should remember
Stanford’s recollections of Meeke’s
teaching and Greene’s description
of his tone. The beauty of this
music is to be found, not in Brahmsian
fullness, but in limpid, singing
tone production, in the inner
voices as well as the melody line
– even Stanford’s simplest textures
tend to be contrapuntally conceived.
Given this, the textures prove
rich enough for the music they
have to support. Another side
of the same coin is found in the
outer sections of the Scherzo
Marziale op.148/3 (1917) where
the breezy Celtic heroics are
expressed in textures rarely thicker
than are to be found in a middle-period
Beethoven scherzo, and exposed
to a similar temptation to force
them on a modern piano.
On
other occasions, Stanford quite
deliberately set his sights on
the “battleship grand”. This is
most obvious in the “Dante
Rhapsodies” but for much of
the time the 5 Caprices
op.136 (1913) are more obviously
massive in their sonorities than
the preceding op.132 or the succeeding
op.148. Yet within these pieces
– as also in the Concertos – there
are also more delicate passages
harking back to the pianos of
Stanford’s youth, creating a difficult
stylistic and technical balancing
act for the performer.
We
may ask at this point, how much
pedal is to be used? This is particularly
relevant when we remember that
Stanford was as much an organist
as a pianist, and therefore would
not have been tendentially the
type of pianist who relied on
a sea of pedal to cover his sins
or, indeed, as a cheap and easy
way of warming up his tone. When
he writes a single pedal mark
in the outer sections of the Scherzo
Marziale, or none at all in
the Toccata op.132/6, we
may surely take him very nearly
at his word. For what it is worth,
the pencilled markings on my second-hand
copy of the latter show that a
player much closer to Stanford’s
own times was very sparing in
his pedalling.
On
the other hand, the harp-like
interjections to the chorale-theme
at the centre of the Nocturne
op.148/1 (1917) and many episodes
in the Caprice in D minor
op.136/2 (1913) and the Ballade
op.170 (1919) show that he was
well aware of the magic of a non-harmony
note caught in the midst of an
arpeggio by the pedal, mainly
but not exclusively in more delicate
passages. On the other
hand, several arpeggio-shaped
passages which look on paper as
if they are to be pedalled actually
sound horrible if so treated. Having admitted
the pedal to our feast, then of
course much of the music inhabits
the same grey area as the earlier
romantics, Chopin and Schumann
in particular, obliging the performer
to find his own – and his piano’s
– golden mean between atmospheric
warmth and clarity. The opening
of the Nocturne, for example,
would be unthinkably dry without
pedal, yet one would wish the
triplets and roulades to sound
as clean and untrammelled as they
would if played on the clarinet.
The
last Prelude – “Addio”
– of op.179 has a final cadence
that looks as if it needs a third
“sostenuto” pedal to resolve
cleanly without losing the bass.
The F major prelude from this
set also has low Fs held as a
pedal note throughout, seemingly
suggesting an awareness of the
sostenuto pedal. On the
other hand, the song-cycle “An
Irish Idyll” op.77 (1900 or
1901) concludes with a similarly
problematic cadence. Given that
Stanford is unlikely to have seen
a sostenuto pedal back
then, he probably just expected
careful half-pedalling in similar
cases.
The
fact that Stanford was an organist
is occasionally evident in other
ways. The opening theme of the
Toccata op.132/6 (1912)
would actually fit better on the
feet – albeit with niftier heel-and-toe-work
than I could manage myself – than
it does under the hands. This
could prove that organists are
naturally inclined to conceive
foot-shaped melodies. But as there
are no other obvious examples
in Stanford’s work, we may wonder
if the piece was first conceived
for organ.
More
fundamental is Stanford’s habitual
use of wide leaps, particularly
in the left hand, alternating
between full chords in the middle
register and low octaves. He was
already doing this by 1898 – see
Variation 11 of the Concert
Variations –
but a pretty fiendish example,
involving both hands, occurs at
the beginning of the Caprice
in C minor, op.136/1 (1913). This
passage could actually be transcribed
for the organ – alternating manuals
and pedals – in such a way as
to make it quite convenient to
play, though it would lose most
of its insouciant verve in the
process. The overcoming of difficulties
as an essential part of communicating
bravura was evidently something
that Stanford understood. Quite
exceptionally in all the piano
repertoire known to me, Stanford’s
leaps go in the same direction,
gaining a point in the difficulty
scale even against the notorious
coda to Schumann’s Fantasie, where
the hands are approximate mirror-images
of each other, something the body
accepts as more natural. We may
be thankful indeed that Stanford
did not employ Schumann’s dotted
rhythms, or our discomfiture would
be complete.
So
in at least one direction, Stanford
explored an aspect of piano technique,
one as effective as it is treacherous,
that was not especially investigated
elsewhere to the best of my knowledge.
For the rest, his personal mediation
between the much-loved pianos
of his youth and the “battleship
grand” produced writing that leans
towards Brahmsian fullness much
less than one would expect, even
when his harmonies and melodies
incline in that direction.
Nor,
for that matter, does he make
more than the occasional nod towards
Chopin, whose music he certainly
appreciated and to whose
mazurkas he was introduced at
an early age by Meeke. The Nocturne
is the obvious place to look, and the layout
of the accompanying chords at
the beginning does look a little
like Chopin. The cut of the melody
itself and the A flat that casts
its shadow over the second bar
do not resemble Chopin at all,
however. Moreover, the device
of leaving the first beat unaccompanied
finds no parallel in any Chopin
nocturne, while it has many in
Stanford’s song accompaniments.
Given
the Irish connection, one would
expect Stanford to have been appreciative
of Field, the inventor of the
nocturne. The default evidence
is that he had no regard for him
at all. He concludes chapter 15
of A History of Music with
a consideration of the “signs
of life” shown by British music
in the period immediately preceding
his own. Sterndale Bennett, S.S.
Wesley, Walmisley and Pearsall
earn some praise. The popularity
of Balfe and Wallace and the industry
of G.A. Macfarren are acknowledged.
And that is all.
5.
An overview of the repertoire
A
small group of compositions from
Stanford’s teens issued without
date by M. Gunn of Dublin
included a Romance for piano entitled
Une fleur de mai. Stanford
thought enough of it to have it
reissued by Edwin Ashdown around
1888 without any suggestion that
it was not new. Going back still
further, a Musical Times tribute
to Stanford in 1898 printed a
march he had written for the pantomime
“Puss-in-Boots” at the
age of eight.
His
student years at Cambridge and
their accompanying visits to Germany
to study with Reinecke and Kiel
produced several piano works:
2 Novelettes (1874), Charivari
in Dresden (5 Phantasie-stücke)
(for duet, 1875), a Suite
(1875), a Toccata (1875)
and 6 Waltzes (in both
solo and duet versions, 1876).
Of these, the Suite and
the Toccata were published
c.1876 as opp. 2 and 3 respectively. This group
of works was preceded by his first
attempt at a piano concerto (1873).
Though
Land
of Sunset
Glories
consists largely of music
written between 1912 and 1920,
the penultimate item is the linked
pair of central movements from
the Suite. I hope that
the listener who has followed
Stanford’s muse thus far will
recognize in the Sarabande
of some forty years earlier that
same epic-Celtic tone of the Ballades,
the Nocturne, the second
Caprice and “Addio”.
The progress to the climax is
less sure in this youthful piece,
yet the bald octaves that break
out are unmistakably Stanford.
Another
feature already present which
he was to use frequently in later
years is the device of a repeated
melody note with changing harmonies
under it. Employed to impressive
effect here, it is prominent in
the Nocturne and Ballade
in F from op.148.
Even
more prophetic in a way is the
Gigue which prances in
with a change to the major. The
use of a short, convivial motive
to create a rollicking finale
mirrors perfectly that side of
Stanford famous from the much-reproduced
“Spy” cartoon where, over the
caption “He found music in Ireland”,
the composer is standing with
his hands in his pockets and his
legs slightly apart, looking mischievously
pleased with himself. This cheeky
verve never left him. At times
Stanford’s readiness to provide
a finale in this vein to a serious
piece of chamber music can seem
a weakness, entertaining but not
deeply stirring. Yet in the finale
of the Second Piano Concerto we
do not feel a drop in the inspiration
as the pianist launches his cocky
theme, and such single pieces
as the “Scherzo Marziale”
op.148/3 and the “Toccata”
op.132/6 belong to the same spirit-raising
category as some his popular nautical
songs. Interestingly ambivalent
is the first Caprice op.136/1
where the grim striving of the
beginning is treated with a touch
of blarney and before long he
is twinkling away like a leprechaun.
And
yet this Gigue is prophetic
in another way, for in its breezy-folksy
manner – “Dame, get up and bake
your pies” that isn’t – it seems
a blueprint for much Grainger
and even Holst’s piano Toccata
on the “Newburn Lads” and
“Chrissemas Day in the Morning”.
From
the mid-1870s to 1912 Stanford
wrote only sporadically for piano.
Ostensibly, he was busy with big
festival commissions – oratorios,
cantatas and so on – and simply
did not have the time for lesser
pieces. Certainly, the few piano
works written during this period
were the fruit of specific occasions
or attempts to interest specific
pianists. The Sonata was
part of a planned project of ten
sonatas by leading contemporary
composers, a collaboration
with Fanny Davies over the Bach
triple concerto (1895) may have some
connection with his dedication
to her of the second book of his
Six Concert Pieces op.42
(1894), while Stanford’s more
domestic side resulted in Ten
Dances, Old and New, for Young
Players op.58 (1894), dedicated
to his children Geraldine and
Guy. The productive relationships
with Leonard Borwick and Percy
Grainger have already been described,
the latter inspiring Stanford’s
fourth solo piano work during
this period and his most ambitious
– the “Dante Rhapsodies”
op.92 (1904).
In
the event, the Sonata remained
unpublished and Fanny Davies never
played her pieces. The Dances
were published. Moreover,
the five “old” dances were promptly
orchestrated – Stanford conducted
recordings of two of them in 1916
– and the “Morris Dance”
found further use in the opera
“Much Ado About Nothing”
op.76a (1900). The Rhapsodies,
of course, were published and
performed and “Francesca”,
in particular, has attracted considerable
attention down the years.
Given
Stanford’s eminence by this time,
there is no apparent reason why
his Sonata should not have
been taken up by another publisher
after the Carte project failed,
but this did not happen and the
manuscript is lost. Fuller Maitland,
who gave the third and last performance
in 1885, remembered the work
as “spontaneous”. There is still
less reason why the Six Concert
Pieces should not have been
published at a time when piano
works by Parry, Mackenzie, Cowen
and many lesser figures were regularly
issued. Yet the surviving manuscript
of Book Two contains directions
to the engravers, so a planned
publication evidently fell through.
Much later, in 1917, no.6, a Mazurka,
was recycled virtually unchanged
as no.5 of “Night Thoughts”
op.148, without any hint that
it was not new.
Yet
the idea that Stanford was just
too busy to write smaller works
does not tally with the fact that
a stream of songs, equally suitable
for concert and home use, streamed
from his pen throughout this period.
The issue of the modern piano,
combined with the fact that his
own efforts as a pianist were
directed towards chamber music
and accompanying, maybe held him
back. His pianistic instincts
served him well when writing for
piano with other instruments or
with voices. So perhaps he really
did lack the time to work out
a personal style for solo piano
music. Notably, the surviving
op.42 pieces show no advance,
purely as piano writing, on the
group from the 1870s. Whereas
the “Dante Rhapsodies”,
inspired by Grainger’s playing,
represent a spirited, at times
thunderous, attempt to provide
suitable material for the “battleship
grand”.
In
spite of their dedication to Moritz
Rosenthal, the Six Characteristic
Pieces op.132 (1912) are less
taxing than the Rhapsodies.
They came at a time when the various
festival commissions were petering
out in favour of younger composers
and Stanford had to fight an increasingly
losing battle to gain a hearing
for his larger works. At this
point there were clear attractions
provided by the ready market for
piano music that was challenging
enough to be included in recitals
if so wished, but not beyond the
reach of the capable domestic
pianist. From here to the end
of his life he wrote regularly
for the instrument, working out
over the 5 Caprices op.136
(1913), the 6 Night Thoughts
op.148 (1917), the 6 Scčnes
de Ballet op.150 (1917), the
two sets of 24 Preludes
opp.163 (1918) and 179 (1920),
the Ballade in G minor
op.170 (pub. 1919), the 3 Waltzes
op.178 (pub. 1923), the unpublished
3 Nocturnes op.184 (1921)
and several single, unnumbered
pieces, the personal mediation
between the loved pianos of his
youth and the “battleship grand”
described above. Less artistically
stimulating but a source of much-needed
money nonetheless in the post-war
period was the expanding market
for educational music. He did
not allot opus numbers to these
pieces but nonetheless the two
sets of 6 Sketches, Primary
and Elementary , the 6 Song
Tunes (pub.1920), A Toy
Story – 6 Pieces (pub.1920),
the 3 Fancies (pub.1924),
a group of Irish folksong arrangements
(pub.1922 or later) and the two
unpublished Sonatinas (1922)
contain at least some numbers
that could still be profitably
used. Slightly less elementary
than the rest, the Fancies
offer interesting parallels with
the Fantasies he was writing
at that time for clarinet with
string quartet and horn with string
quartet. True to his proverbial
industry, in spite of his late
start as a regular composer for
the instrument, if Stanford’s
piano music were ever recorded
in its entirety it would require
more CDs than the intégrales
of Schumann or Brahms.
Land of Sunset
Glories is
a line from “Ireland”,
the first song in the “Cushendall”
cycle op.118 (1910). It is not
intended to be merely a fanciful
title for the new CD. These last
years of Stanford’s life were
ones of increasing emotional pain
and isolation. The war years offered
the grim spectacle of Germany,
the country which had once offered
him such warm hospitality, the
cradle of the western musical
tradition in the form in which
he most revered it, and the country
where he had met his wife, engaged
in futile military belligerence
on a massive scale. Yet if he
had once found something of a
spiritual home in Germany, the adored land
of his origin, Ireland,
offered no solace. The Anglo-Irish
Dublin community he depicted so
lovingly in the opening chapters
of “Pages from an Unwritten Diary”
was doomed even in his youth if
he had but known it and was now
slipping hopelessly from view
as Home Rule became a reality.
Whatever we may think of his anti-Home
Rule stance, the effect was that
his work became increasingly Irish
in its colouring, Celtic-epic
in tone even when not ostensibly
Irish in its subject matter. The
Ireland
he depicted was nevertheless a
far-off dream, ever more unreal.
Unawares, he thus entered the
mainstream of Celtic-Anglo-Irish
art, which always has been concerned
with the evocation of a romantic-mythical-legendary
Ireland
that never existed. This goes
for Yeats as much as for Stanford.
Indeed, we may go further and
say that what we recognize as
a Celtic tone in art is essentially
an appeal to an unreality that
nevertheless stirs our unconscious
imaginations.
It
is in his avowedly Celtic pieces,
then, that Stanford carved out
a small but individual niche for
himself in the piano repertoire:
on this CD, the Nocturne,
with its A flat memorably darkening
the second bar, the intimate Ballade
in F, the often passionate Ballade
in G minor and the second Caprice,
a complete misnomer, for it is
a deeply felt Caoine similar to
that in the Clarinet Sonata and
no less moving. Less immediately
striking, the Roundel,
a tribute to Schumann, belongs
with certain choral works such
as Justorum animae and
Heraclitus as a Stanford
piece whose quiet beauty grows
with time.
Space
permitting, one of these pieces
can well be paired with one of
the high-spirited ones. And the
two sets of Preludes will always
arouse curiosity. In later years
Stanford became fascinated by
the formulae of light dance music,
and in this he was more at one
with his times than he realized.
The Tempo di valse op.163/10
lacks the harmonic acerbities
of a Stravinsky take on the waltz,
yet it hones in on the formulae
no less acutely. The opening paragraph
gives us, in the space of a few
bars, the accompaniment on just
beats 1 and 2, just beats 2 and
3, and on all three beats. The
central part takes issue with
a slow waltz pattern spread –hemiola-like
– across a fast one, as does the
less ironic Waltz op.178/2.
Towards the end melody disappears
in favour of formula and, after
a pause, the piece is paid off
with three bars of oomp-pah-pah
plus a closing melodic turn, as
though to say “and that’s all
there is to it”. The “Basso
ostinato”, op.179/14 is based
on a four-note descending scale
in the bass. Beginning like a
serenade, it develops through
Elgarian wistfulness to an unexpectedly
powerful climax, relapsing into
an enigmatic coda.
In
“Addio” op.179/24 the mask
is off. A good many Stanford pieces
from this period bear dedications
to friends, friends’ children
and pupils who perished in the
war. There is no specific reference
here, yet it surely depicts a
military funeral, beginning with
the three-note motive derived
from the word Addio, followed
by tender memories and prayers
alternating with sobbing and the
approaching funeral march which
rises to a stark climax. A soft
brass chorale suggests the lowering
of the coffin into the grave,
followed by a final prayer and
then, breaking the gentler mood,
the firing of a military salvo,
after which the music fades uneasily
into sunset glory.
Christopher
Howell
Appendix
LAND
OF SUNSET
GLORIES
Piano Music by Charles
Villiers Stanford
This
CD will be issued by Sheva, a
company based in Piedmont, Italy
(info: destefaniermanno@libero.it),
during September 2008. Orders
can by taken by MusicWeb-International
from 1st September
2008. The programme is:
1.
Nocturne in G minor op.148/1 (1917)
2.
Tempo di Valse op.163/10 (1918)
3.
Basso Ostinato op.179/14 (1920)
4.
Caprice in C minor op.136/1 (1913)
5.
Roundel op.132/4 (1912)
6.
Ballade in G minor op.170 (1919)
7.
Waltz in D minor op.178/2 (pub.1923)
8.
Ballade in F major op.148/2 (1917)
9.
Scherzo Marziale op.148/3 (1917)
10.
Caprice in D minor op.136/2 (1913)
11.
Toccata in C minor op.132/6 (1912)
12.
Sarabande op.2/2 (1875)
13.
Gigue op.2/3 (1875)
14.
“Addio” op.179/24 (1920)
Christopher
Howell – piano
The
overall title of the collections
to which the opus numbers refer
are:
Suite
op.2 (1875)
Six
Characteristic Pieces op.132 (1912)
Five
Caprices op.136 (1913)
Night
Thoughts op.148 (1917)
Twenty-four
Preludes in all the keys op.163
(1918)
Ballade
in G minor op.170 (1919)
Three
Waltzes op.178 (pub.1923)
Twenty-four
Preludes in all the keys, second
series op.179 (1920)
To
the best of my knowledge, only
the items from opp.132, 163 and
179 have been recorded previously.
