Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician
by Jeremy Dibble (Oxford 2002, 535 pp) £65
Amazon
Charles Villiers Stanford
by Paul Rodmell (Ashgate 2002, 495 pp) £57.50
Amazon
These two books have been reviewed for the site
by Chris Fifield, who took the occasion to present a quite detailed
summary of Stanford’s career. If you can’t stretch to either of
these studies, or wouldn’t have time to read them, then go to
his review for your basic information on Stanford. The following
comments will be dedicated to some considerations arising from
the books.
PREVIOUS BOOKS
Paul Rodmell shows justifiable pride in the fact
that his is the first full-length study of Stanford since 1935,
though he must certainly have been aware that Jeremy Dibble’s
book had been in the making ever since he finished his work on
Parry in 1992. Dibble, evidently aware that he was going to lose
this particular race, makes no special claims. In the event it
hardly matters; history will remember that they came out in tandem
during the composer’s 150th anniversary year.
That no study had been made since 1935 suggests
that the book in question, Charles Villiers Stanford by
Harry Plunket Greene (Edward Arnold 1935), must have been a pretty
definitive affair, but in reality it has long been a source of
frustration to the composer’s admirers, a declaredly partial "Stanford-as-I-knew-him"
account by one of his closest friends, prepared in collaboration
with Stanford’s widow. It is hazy – when not freely inventive
– on dates and chronology, the style is patently not that of a
professional writer (Greene was one of the leading baritones of
his day), yet it is eminently readable and paints an affectionate
and attractive portrait of Stanford the man. Too attractive? Of
the many friends, colleagues and professional contacts of the
composer who have left some sort of memorial in print, a fair
number corroborate Greene’s portrait, but alongside these are
the many whom he succeeded in alienating – most famously Elgar
– and who quite frankly couldn’t stand the sight of him. Greene
doesn’t entirely suppress this fact, but he bends over backwards
to demonstrate that Stanford was in every case the injured party.
To be fair to Greene, the sort of "warts-and-all" study
we expect today was not normal practice at the time, when public
men were invariably commemorated with an "X-as-I-knew-him"
apologia by a friend or family member. These accounts have little
hard value today except as source material for researchers.
Previous to this one other book had appeared,
Charles Villiers Stanford by John F. Porte (Kegan Paul
1921), which consisted basically of an introduction and a commented
catalogue, in order of opus number, of Stanford’s works. This
is a fumbling affair, riddled with inaccuracies, heavy in style,
and obviously lacks information about the last few years. However,
while it is not definitely stated whether the composer gave Porte
any assistance, occasional comments seem to show a degree of inside
knowledge, so the book cannot be wholly disregarded. Unfortunately,
as late as the 1950s it still formed the basis of the catalogue
of Stanford’s works in Grove V. The cataloguing of Stanford’s
music was taken up by Frederick Hudson whose "Revised and
Extended Catalogue of C. V. Stanford" appeared in Music Review
in 1976 and the German MGG encyclopaedia, and thence the New Grove.
Alas, this was still very much "work in progress" and
contained numerous errors and omissions. However, in the ensuing
years, up until his recent death, Hudson made handsome amends,
creating the Stanford Archive in the Robinson Library of Newcastle
University. The intention, largely realised, was to amass as complete
a collection of Stanford material as possible in one place. To
this end he persuaded the owners of many autograph scores and
other documents to donate or deposit them with the Archive, to
which were added photocopies of much other material and a virtually
complete run of printed scores, in originals or photocopies. At
the same time his catalogue continued to expand, and those who
have seen it testify that it is a very scholarly piece of work,
with maximum information about performances, dedicatees etc. of
each piece. It was virtually completed by the time of his death
and it would be nice to think it could be published one day. I
have not seen the catalogue in the latest New Grove but I understand
it is based on Hudson’s final researches revised by Dibble, and
so presume it is similar to the catalogue which appears in Dibble’s
own book.
For completeness John Fuller Maitland’s The
Music of Parry and Stanford (Heffer & Sons 1934) should
be mentioned, and more recently Gerald Norris has published Stanford,
the Cambridge Jubilee and Tchaikovsky (David & Charles
1980). This is a racy, readable affair which has to be considered
a secondary source in that it seems to be the product of extensive
reading of contemporary literature (singers’ memoirs and the like),
taking the dates and facts on trust rather than checking them
by research. And, last but not least, there is Stanford’s own
autobiography Pages from an Unwritten Diary (Edward Arnold
1914) and two other books which bring together most of the articles
he wrote for various magazines: Studies and Memories (Constable
1908) and Interludes, Records and Reflections (Murray 1922).
Pages, in particular, makes for very pleasant
reading, but Stanford clearly has no wish to bare himself before
the public. After a charming account of his family and the Dublin
of his youth the book is very much a collection of often vivid
portraits of people he met in the course of his career, and possibly
more useful for the researcher wanting information about them
than for those who wish to know about him. We gather that
he was passionately dedicated to obtaining a square deal for his
profession, both in terms of recognition and money-wise, and to
having his countries’ (both England’s and Ireland’s) musical achievements
recognised abroad, and to the cause of opera in England, but that
is about it. His family life is kept a closed door and his wife
is nowhere mentioned.
PROBLEMS FOR THE BIOGRAPHER
One reason why it has taken so long for a new
biography to appear is that Stanford’s stock was so low during
much of the post-war period that any book written between 1945
and 1985 would almost certainly not have found a publisher. Another
is that anyone considering the task quickly found out that it
would be far from easy, much harder than in the case of Parry.
Parry conveniently left a diary covering almost
the whole of his life, and also kept most of his letters. For
virtually any date we know where he was, what he was doing and
what he thought about it. Moreover, his descendents remain at
Shulbrede Priory and his papers have been maintained there, so
we also know where to look for the basic facts.
Already in 1935 Plunket Greene had to admit defeat
in assembling a chronological account. Stanford almost certainly
kept no diary (none was found) and seems to have kept a "clean
desk", throwing away letters as he answered them, maintaining
only a small scrap book of letters from particularly famous people
(Greene assures us that "a most thorough search" was
made for further correspondence). Plenty of letters from Stanford
were made available to Greene, from which it emerged that he only
began to date them from the mid-80s. All this led Greene to "abandon
the idea of historical sequence and to deal with the Life roughly
by periods and subjects".
Admirers of Stanford have been cursing him ever
since! To be fair, our notions of research have become more rigorous
over the years, but the very paucity of concrete material made
it all the more imperative to puzzle out the facts while there
were still people around who might remember them. Clearly, things
haven’t got any easier today. Even such material as Greene had
has partly disappeared, including a series of letters (which he
mentions but does not directly quote) between Stanford and his
father regarding his future wife and the letters from Stanford
to Greene himself, of which he blandly remarks "Some of them,
most reluctantly, I cannot quote – he was ever a fighter".
Both Dibble and Rodmell state their belief that this material
was destroyed during the 1950s. For another difference with Parry
is that there are no direct descendants. Stanford’s two children,
Geraldine and Guy, both died childless and he himself was an only
child (but his wife came from a family of nine, so what about
the relations on that side?). Rodmell tells us that the wills
of the two children make no mention of papers and that their interests
in Stanford’s copyrights were bequeathed to the British Empire
Cancer Campaign and the Royal School of Church Music, suggesting
that any remaining relatives were distant and uninterested.
Rodmell has located some 800 surviving letters
from Stanford; he makes a conservative estimate that he must have
written at least 28,000 during his adult life. It would be interesting
to have a selection of these published one day, together with
some of his many letters to the press, though the absence of the
letters which provoked them or replied to them would be limiting.
From those quoted by both authors, however, it appears that the
letters do not reveal much about the man; many of them deal with
practical matters such as terms and conditions for performances
and publication of his music. If he ever made even such a conventional
cry from the heart as "oh, how I long to get away from it
all for a few weeks" (though he did get away from
it all, with his family, for a few weeks after his mother died),
suffered from Tchaikovsky-like doubts about the adequacy of his
own talent, underwent existential, religious or marital crises,
not a trace of it survives and any friend who knew kept his mouth
tight shut.
So what is the biographer to do? Clearly, a great
number of facts can be discovered about the society in which he
lived, the people who surrounded him and the music he may have
heard. One part of his life is all on the public record since
he had an active career as a pianist and organist (in his earlier
days) and, more notably, as a conductor (almost to the end of
his life) and held appointments with major institutions. He frequently
wrote letters to the press and, while he left no evidence in words
regarding his inner life, he scrupulously dated his scores. So,
on a superficial level it is possible to reconstruct his life,
and both Rodmell and Dibble have painstakingly done all this.
Do they get us any nearer to the man himself?
THE EARLY YEARS
To start with his early life, both Stanford himself
and Greene painted a glowing portrait of the Dublin they had both
known and loved, and a modern author could not hope to match this
"I was there" quality. What both Rodmell and Dibble
have managed to do is to check out the facts (Stanford and Greene
mostly relied on memory) and to discuss with the benefit of historical
perspective the position of the Anglo-Irish Dublin community of
which Stanford was a part. We can now put Stanford’s more personalised
account into its proper context.
And yet, though their researches have led to
broadly similar results, there are two intriguing differences.
Rodmell gives the genealogical tree for both of Stanford’s parents;
Dibble doesn’t actually give it in tabulated form but has obviously
studied the matter. Both agree that the earliest Stanford about
whom we have definite knowledge and from whom Stanford’s own lineage
can be traced was a Luke Stanford of County Cavan who died in
1733. Rodmell assumes that this Stanford was of English origin
and suggests that a Luke Stanford born in London in 1633 may have
been the father of the County Cavan Stanford. Whereas Dibble,
relying on information supplied by one of Stanford’s surviving
relations, Eileen le Clerc, notes that a Robert de Stanford had
been a prior at Christ Church Dublin between 1242 and 1263. This
may be wishful thinking on le Clerc’s part and it is unlikely
that either hypothesis can be proved now, but it is interesting
that the English/Irish contradiction in Stanford rears its head
so early in the tale, Rodmell’s theory making him basically an
Englishman while Dibble allows for the possibility that his roots
may be more purely Irish and above all Celtic.
Two other fascinating points, which only Dibble
tells us, are that Stanford’s father John had been previously
married to one Harriet Green, presumed to have died young and
childless (but as he was 41 when he married Stanford’s future
mother the marriage needn’t have been that short), and that Stanford
had an elder brother who died young. This last point is potentially
important. How young? Could Stanford himself have had any
memories of him? If not, was he ever told that he had had an elder
brother, and at what age? Here are a number of questions which
can probably never be answered, yet which might have a profound
bearing on Stanford’s family life and psychological make-up. Could
their implications not have been explored a little further, at
least to establish the age at which the brother died?
HIS ADULT LIFE
Both authors seem to agree that, in the absence
of any knowledge of Stanford’s inner life, his career is mapped
out by certain external events which give rise to new chapters:
the move to Cambridge, the Royal College appointment and subsequent
move from Cambridge, the Leeds Festival and the war. Thus the
two accounts are structurally similar, though since there are
intriguing differences in their choice of quotations from his
surviving letters they do not duplicate one another and I would
not be without either. In the last resort, though, the man walks
on and off stage, doing his job and composing his music, and it
seems impossible to get any closer to him than that. In essence
his life is an account of pieces written, performances played
and conducted, appointments he held, lessons he gave and people
he quarrelled with. Thanks to this latter, the story never becomes
dull, whichever version you read, for, as one of his friends said,
"Charlie will have his quarrel". However, in the interests
of correcting Greene’s rosy picture, I feel that Rodmell in particular
has gone out of his way to make him appear as unpleasant as possible.
Greene’s view of him as an impulsive, irascible but nonetheless
loveable grown-up schoolboy was shared by many of his friends
and I am convinced that those who left such opinions in print
genuinely felt like that – as did those who considered him a trouble-maker,
a climber or even a sham.
I also feel that certain passages from Greene
regarding Stanford’s family life and recreational activities might
have been referred to more extensively (they are barely mentioned).
After all, counterbalancing Greene is all very well if the reader
has a copy of Greene, but since the book is long out of print
and little would be served by reissuing it, in view of its inaccuracies,
perhaps its more valuable parts might have been drawn on more
extensively. All the same, both authors produce thoroughly readable
accounts.
THE MUSIC
Both writers have elected to incorporate their
discussions of the music in the main part of the text, discussing
the works as they come up in the story. Rodmell, however, adds
some chapters at the end in which he attempts to sum up Stanford’s
achievement as a conductor, teacher and composer.
Rodmell admits in the preface that he has a particular
interest in the operas, which he discusses in great detail, though
it is sad that, in his view, Savanarola and Lorenza,
are total write-offs. Dibble, while admitting their shortcomings,
is rather more positive. In all truth, it is practically impossible
to judge an opera without having seen a first-class production
of it in the theatre, and I just hope that Rodmell won’t put anyone
off trying!
Rodmell also gives very detailed accounts of
the Symphonies, Rhapsodies and several other orchestral works,
and I was happy to see him speaking up for the Mass in G (which
Dibble barely mentions). On the other hand, he doesn’t seem very
much interested in the chamber music, dismissing it as "opaque".
The only string quartet I have actually heard played is no.8,
which didn’t sound opaque at all; to judge from the scores I don’t
see why the first three should do so either; indeed, no.3 is very
lean, almost spare in its scoring, though I would agree with those
commentators who have found it less thematically distinguished
than the first two. These latter, not mentioned by Rodmell, have
collected plaudits from writers as different as Bernard Shaw,
Thomas F. Dunhill and Geoffrey Bush. Two other works which have
been much praised over the years are the First Piano Trio and
the Second Cello Sonata, in view of which something more detailed
than "Stanford falls victim to his periodic prolixity"
seems called for.
Having made a particular study of the songs I
had hoped to find here amplification or at least corroboration
of my knowledge; here too, Rodmell seems only fitfully interested.
Typical is his paragraph on "Cushendall":
Cushendall, which comprises six songs
to words by John Stevenson, was Stanford’s first collection
of Irish songs since An Irish Idyll and, like the earlier
work, does not really succeed. Three of the songs, "Did
you ever?", "The Crow" and "Daddy-long-legs",
are bland affairs; the quotation of Brunnhilde’s Fire motif
in the latter at "You try to moderate your legs in lamp
or candle flame" sits incongruously in its surroundings,
and while Stevenson’s comparison of a crow with a lawyer would
have tickled Stanford, his setting did not add to the poetry.
The other three, "Ireland", "Cushendall"
and "How does the wind blow?", are better but still
lack intensity; "Cushendall", with its long procession
of secondary sevenths, has a gentle sense of sorrow, but the
climax, despite the poignancy of the words for Stanford, fails
to hit the mark [two lines of music are quoted] (p.261).
These are just opinions; what we want to know
is, who was John Stevenson, what was Stanford trying to do and
by what means did he try to do it? In the light of this, it might
be possible to suggest whether he succeeded or failed. I shall
not attempt to counteract Rodmell simply by replacing his "bland"
with adjectives which describe my own reactions to the music since,
unsupported by analysis, my opinions are worth neither more nor
less than his: that is to say, nothing at all. Furthermore, Rodmell
must have been so cheesed off by the time he got to the end of
the sixth song that he didn’t even notice that it is followed
by a seventh, "Night" (though this is correctly listed
in the worklist at the end of the book).
I feel that Rodmell’s approach to the music is
weakened by two assumptions. One is that since he is a critic
he has to criticise, and the other is that he takes the "old
school" view that Stanford was basically a pretty poor composer;
the sum of his two attitudes means that, for each work discussed,
he applies a sort of Napoleonic critical code, starting from the
assumption that there must be something the matter with it and
then tries to find out what it is. This leads, for example, to
his observation that "The Blue Bird" is "little
short of perfection". Many of us have believed over the years
that this, of all Stanford’s works, actually was perfect; since
Rodmell has evidently detected a chink in the armour somewhere
I feel he might have told us what it is. To be fair, however,
he is often perceptive with regard to those works for which he
evidently feels sympathy, for example in his defence of the structure
of the Irish Symphony’s finale.
Dibble is much more evenhanded; it is nice that
he can find space to describe, for example, the Harold Boulton
volume which contains "For ever mine", for it is these
little corners that bring illumination to the reader. He seems
to hold the viewpoint that Stanford was actually a rather good
composer and consequently applies habeus corpus, trying
to appreciate his aims and methods. I felt his Parry book suffered
from an obsession with the idea that musical analysis means listing
all the keys a particular work goes through and he has not lost
this particular vice, but you can skip those parts. In general,
as readers of his notes for a goodly number of CDs will know,
he is a helpful guide to what is still unknown territory for most
listeners.
GENERAL SUMMING UP
Having reached the end of Stanford’s life, Dibble
concludes with a minimum of general comment, indeed, his ending
seems a little abrupt; in a further section of some 70 pages Rodmell
attempts to sum up Stanford’s achievement.
His conclusions on Stanford as a conductor are
unexceptionable except that, in assessing a conductor’s work,
it would be a normal practice to take into consideration any recordings
he made, yet Rodmell nowhere mentions (and neither does Dibble
for that matter) the two sessions which Stanford cut in 1916 and
1923. These have never been transferred to CD but in 1974 Pearl
issued an LP containing what they believed to be the complete
recordings, though a reference to John Holmes’s massive study
of conductors shows that some sides had not been located since
Stanford recorded the First Irish Rhapsody complete (Pearl gave
us only the first part) and a part of the Irish Symphony (not
present on the disc). Admittedly this is evidence to be approached
with caution since the sound is obviously primitive and the anonymous
(pick up?) orchestra used in 1916 is ropy, but it gains in cohesion
as the sessions advance, which surely tells us something, and
Stanford’s steady tempo in the Rhapsody shows that he did not
want it to sound like an Irish jig (Vernon Handley please note!).
The 1923 recording of Songs of the Fleet is rather mysterious
since there seems to be no precise date, but it was apparently
made late in the year when Stanford had only a few months to live
and had officially retired from conducting. At times he seems
rather questionably in charge, but he also insists on points of
string articulation in The Song of the Sou’ Wester which Norman
Del Mar passes over in his EMI recording and adopts a freely rumbustious
approach to The Little Admiral which sometimes catches the players
by surprise. So at least some audible evidence of his methods
exists.
The list of Stanford’s pupils is generally considered
to be proof in itself of his effectiveness as a teacher and Rodmell
gives us a "selective" (but pretty extensive nonetheless)
list of them. He also gives an interesting list of the appointments
held by Stanford’s pupils, showing that the British musical world
(and beyond if we consider Bainton and Hart in Australia and Friskin
at the Julliard School) was dominated by RCM/Stanford products
at least until 1945. He quotes extensively from the memories of
many of these, then turns devil’s advocate, suggesting that it
was Stanford’s good luck, because of his strategic position at
the RCM, to have a run of such brilliant names that no teacher
could have failed with them. However, he concludes that "Although
one could not attribute the extent of Stanford’s influence to
a design of his own making, without him the direction taken by
British composers in the first half of the twentieth century might
have been very different".
Rodmell then turns to the music itself. In view
of the fact that Stanford held that good orchestral music must
sound effective on the piano (in other words it must not depend
on orchestral colour to make it sound better than it is) perhaps
he would not have been unduly flattered by the fact that Rodmell
singles out his orchestration as one of his particularly successful
points. And yet it is true; the experience of hearing a performance
with orchestra of a choral/orchestral work which one has only
known in vocal score can be remarkable, the richness and the colour
adding a dimension one would not have suspected. The first part
of Rodmell’s chapter on "Stanford the Composer" concludes
that there is "a mode of expression which can be highly individual
and unmistakably Stanfordian"; he points in particular to
the composer’s use of appoggiatura and of flatwards modulation.
There is still an infinite amount of work to be done here but
these are certainly valid starting points.
Rodmell next considers Stanford’s claims to be
considered Irish. The whole question of nationality and music
is fraught with pitfalls, and if the question of the Anglo-Irish
status (were they English or Irish?) is added, then politics enter
the picture as well. I may be naïve, but it seems to me that
things have come to a pretty pass if a man whose Irish ancestors
can be traced back to at least 1733 cannot be considered an Irishman
of some sort. By this argument, most of the men who shaped the
rise of American music during the 20th Century were
not Americans at all!
Perhaps this is all a red herring. A more profitable
line of inquiry might be to seek the common characteristics of
composers who have a proven Celtic lineage and then see if Stanford’s
music shares these characteristics. Stanford the Celt, as opposed
to Stanford the Irishman, is not discussed by Rodmell.
Finally, Rodmell assesses the decline of Stanford’s
reputation, and produces two interesting tables showing the years
in which various works by Stanford were withdrawn from sale, and
the sales of vocal scores of The Revenge from 1886 down to 1974.
This information comes from the Novello Archive in the BL; it’s
a pity that similar information from Stanford’s other publishers
was not available. For example in about 1972, when I set about
buying copies of all that remained in print, whereas Novello and
Boosey had precious little left in their catalogues, Stainer &
Bell still had a large selection, so it would be interesting to
know how much of it they were actually selling. This chapter concludes
with a discussion of certain points which have dogged Stanford’s
reputation over the years; his fluency, the anachronistic nature
of his style and his respectability. I must say I find much of
this general summing up repetitive and inconclusive and I wonder
if any of us really know the music
enough yet – and over a long enough period for it to be a part
of us in the way that Brahms or Dvořák are – to be able to
make the sort of sweeping conclusions at which Rodmell aims. I
suggest Dibble was wise to avoid such an attempt.
Both authors provide a worklist. Rodmell’s is
a "Select list of works" in chronological order, which
means all those with opus numbers plus a fair number of others
inserted among them. Unfortunately he gives many titles without
any indication as to what the work actually is, so the reader
faced with Lorenza, Prince Madoc’s Farewell, Phaudrig Crohoore
and Six Elizabethan Pastorals is left to find out as
best he may that they are, respectively, an opera, a song for
voice and piano, a cantata for chorus and orchestra and pieces
for unaccompanied SATB choir. Some of this information can be
hunted down in the body of the text, but not all. Composition
dates and the whereabouts of the manuscript are given; where the
manuscript is missing and the date is printed at the foot of the
printed score he sometimes includes it but a good many more completion
dates could have been obtained this way (see below). Likewise,
in the cases where the only clue we have to the composition date
is the date of publication, he sometimes includes it but more
often does not. He gives the original publishers, but frequently
gives them wrongly, and the date of the first performance. Here,
too, his information often clashes with Dibble’s though I am in
most cases unable to say who is right. He also gives a list of
CDs currently available and I feel that this is just wasted space;
the shelf life of a book will probably be for the remainder of
the owner’s life and beyond while the CD scene is very volatile
and the list is out of date even now. A search in Internet or
a visit to a good dealer will provide the interested reader with
information as to what is available at any given moment.
Dibble’s worklist is by category and aims to
be complete (I have detected a few omissions and errors; see below).
For evident reasons of space the layout is cluttered and details
of individual pieces in a set (for example the single songs in
a cycle) are not given. Both authors provide, as well as a general
index, a separate index of references to specific works. Using
this has alerted me to a possible problem with Dibble. Having
begun his discussion of the works and activities of Stanford in
a specific year, he then proceeds, maybe for several pages, "on
February 7th … three weeks later …. In early May ….
Towards the end of the following month". This is fine when
you are reading the book consecutively, but I suspect that most
readers, having read it once, will use it above all as a reference
book, and at times, having looked up a reference, I had to go
back several pages to see which year he is talking about. I wonder
if a future edition might revise this point?
I have the impression that the 150th
anniversary year arrived all too quickly for both authors. A further
reading might have weeded out such repetitions as "over the
succeeding years his involvement with Cambridge had steadily reduced,
such that his involvement had come down to the bare minimum"
(Rodmell p.326), not to speak of the following account of a posthumous
holiday by Mr. and Mrs. Liszt (or is it an early death by Stanford?):
Liszt left London for Bayreuth but by the
time Stanford arrived there to hear performances of Tristan
and Parsifal under Mottl in August he was dead.
After Bayreuth he and his wife spent some time in Berchtesgaden
… (Dibble p.177).
Fifield has already pointed out Jennie Stanford’s
"heeling the rift" with Parry (Rodmell p.64), with its
delightful image of her forcing both men into line with a sharp
dig from her stilettos, or whatever small women wore those days,
but better still is "The Handy Norsewoman" (instead
of "Hardy"; Rodmell p.330). Who needed Jennie Stanford
when he had that?
Worse than these obvious slips, there is an alarming
number of discrepancies between the two books over dates and even
quite important facts, such as the Stanfords’ honeymoon or whether
the music to Queen Mary was eventually performed or not. I had
intended to add a list of these as a footnote, but there are so
many – well into triple figures - and this review is already so
long that I have decided to post it as a separate article. Seriously,
I hope both authors will see this list and check their sources
in the hope that future editions might be more accurate.
So which to buy? If you’re really keen on Stanford,
each has important information not included in the other. If it
must be only one, then Dibble has a remarkable knack of inserting
maximum information in a single sentence, a more even treatment
of the works and a fuller worklist. And where to go from here?
As far as the life is concerned, unless some new source of exceptional
interest were to come to light, it would probably be superfluous
for a third writer to enter the lists, if only the discrepancies
referred to above could be cleared up. Until this is done, the
reliability of either book is questionable. As for the music,
we are still at the beginning and the is plenty of scope for further
studies. I would like to set the ball rolling by posting an article
on "The Triumph of Love" which is extracted from an
unpublished (and, without drastic revision, unpublishable) book
I wrote on Stanford’s songs in 1994. As both writers have pointed
out, we know nothing about Stanford’s more intimate personal feeling
towards his wife, and neither of them have picked up the fact
that this work (about which Rodmell is scathing and Dibble offers
no comment) coincided with his 25th wedding anniversary.
In view of the involvement of Edmond Holmes, the author of the
texts, with their pre-marriage period this can hardly be a coincidence
so perhaps something can be gleaned from a study of this work?
I also wish to make more widely available two articles which I
published in British Music Society News some time ago, "Stanford
and Musical Quotation" and "Stanford’s Couples",
since I feel that both of them suggest lines for further enquiry.
So the interested reader will shortly find the following material
posted on the site:
Errors and discrepancies in two recent books
on Stanford
Stanford, Edmond Holmes and "Triumph of
Love"
Stanford and Musical Quotation
Stanford’s Couples
Christopher Howell
Charles
Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician by
Jeremy Dibble (Oxford 2002, 535 pp) £65
Charles Villiers Stanford by Paul Rodmell (Ashgate 2002,
495 pp) £57.50 [CH]
ERRORS
AND DISCREPANCIES IN TWO RECENT BOOKS ON STANFORD
STANFORD,
EDMOND HOLMES AND "THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE"
STANFORD
AND MUSICAL QUOTATION