Charles Villiers Stanford. By Paul Rodmell.
pp. xx + 495. (Ashgate. Aldershot, 2002, £57.50. ISBN 1-85928-198-2.)
Charles Villiers Stanford. Man and Musician.
By Jeremy Dibble. pp. xvi + 535. (Oxford University Press, 2002. £65.
ISBN 0-19-816383-5.)
Apart from Stanford, The Cambridge Jubilee and Tchaikovsky
by Gerald Norris (1980) in which Stanford plays a pivotal role, it has
been 67 years since the first and last biography of the Irish composer/conductor/pedagogue
was published. Then, rather like waiting for a bus, a pair arrives together
in time for the 150th anniversary of his birth, and if you
can afford to buy both, then do, for each with its various differences
complements the other. That earlier biography was written by Parry’s
son-in-law, the singer Harry Plunket Greene in 1935, and like these
two new books, relied heavily for biographical information on Stanford’s
own autobiography (Pages from an Unwritten Diary, 1914), and
his other books Studies and Memories (1908) and Interludes,
Records and Recollections (1922). As a result there remain huge
gaps of detail in Stanford’s private life which are extremely hard to
fill, such as his own omission in the autobiography of any mention whatsoever
of his wife Jennie or even their marriage. Only a fraction of Stanford’s
personal letters has survived; Rodmell estimates that the 800 autograph
letters he traced represents just the tip of an enormous iceberg, and
that at ten a week, 28,000 is a conservative estimate of the number
of letters Stanford wrote between adulthood commencing in 1870 and his
death in 1924. Stanford’s own children Guy and Geraldine both died childless
in the 1950s, and as Stanford himself was an only child, there are no
close family members to whom letters (including those to him) may have
been bequeathed, and regrettably, as the title of his autobiography
suggests, he kept no diary.
Stanford’s father pinned his hopes on his son entering
the legal profession, and it was only while en route to take
the scholarship examination at Trinity Hall that the son announced rather
nervously to his father that music, rather than the law, was his chosen
career. Fortunately for the young Charles, John Stanford himself had
been thwarted by familial opposition to his own musical ambitions years
before, and so he calmly accepted his son’s plan, providing that he
first obtained a university degree before starting any musical study.
In the end it worked out even better for the young student, for though
he failed the scholarship entry, he was given one of the first organ
scholarships in the university offered by Queens’ College, coupled to
a classical scholarship, and eventually succeeded in obtaining a degree
(albeit a bare pass at third class level). More importantly he soon
found his way into Cambridge University Musical Society (CUMS), his
timely arrival coinciding with an urgent need to regenerate its activities,
currently languishing in the hands of an ailing leadership. Stanford
immediately set to and attempted to change the Society’s constitution
by overturning a rule which debarred women members, thus producing an
exclusively male chorus of a highly spurious standard. The motion was
rejected, and so Stanford forced the issue by founding the Amateur Vocal
Guild with which he gave two highly successful concerts in 1872. It
was not long before CUMS submitted to a merger, especially as the Professor
of Music, Sterndale Bennett, gave Stanford his unequivocal support.
From April 1873 Stanford was appointed conductor of the Society, whereupon
he proceeded to raise performance standards to heights which gained
a reputation far beyond the University to reach London and even continental
Europe, which, as it happened, he visited for the first time that summer.
The purpose of this trip was primarily to attend the
Schumann Festival at Bonn, where he not only imbibed the music with
enthusiasm but also made the acquaintance of Brahms, Hiller, Clara Schumann,
Rudorff, Stockhausen and Joachim. Back in Cambridge he left Queens’
for Trinity in 1874 as college organist, a move which enabled him to
begin his career as a composer as well as conductor and performer, because
generous terms allowed him to take six months abroad including the entire
summer vacation. Leipzig was his destination, a city famed for its musical
heritage from Bach to (barely thirty years before) Mendelssohn, and
which now boasted a famed series of concerts at the Gewandhaus, a flourishing
opera at the Neues Stadttheater, a famous Conservatoire, and many music
publishers of whom Peters and Breitkopf & Härtel were currently
the most famous (by the end of the century there were more than sixty
in the city). At the time, indeed from 1860 to 1895, the Gewandhaus
orchestra was in the hands of Carl Reinecke, who loathed the music of
Liszt and Wagner and denounced that of Brahms. Stanford took composition
lessons from Reinecke, but described him as ‘the most desiccated of
all the dry musicians I have known’.
Back at Cambridge, the post of Professor became vacant
when Bennett died. Although only 23, Stanford decided to apply but withdrew
when he heard that George Macfarren was in the running and subsequently
appointed. Reform was in the air. At the time, and unlike other subjects,
music students were not obliged to reside within the university and
were expected to obtain private instruction, while the Professor (also
free to reside where he chose) was little more than an external examiner.
Stanford had his own vision (embracing practical study as well as theory
and composition), although it was tempered by the time he was in a position
(from his own appointment in 1887) to put it into practice. Meanwhile
he spread his and CUMS’ reputation further afield in May 1875 with the
British premiere of Part III of Schumann’s Faust as well as his
own orchestral anthem The Resurrection in a concert which caught
the attention of the musical fraternity (Parry had by now made his first
reference to Stanford in his diary, 29 January 1875, quoting Robert
Benson’s description of him as ‘a tip-top man’). In the autumn he completed
his first symphony, and submitted it for a competition promoted by the
Alexandra Palace to find the best new symphony by a native composer.
From the 46 entries it won second prize (£5), the first having gone
to Macfarren’s son-in-law Francis Davenport, but had to wait until 8
March 1879 for its first performance at the Crystal Palace. Dibble notes
signs of Schumann in the work, in particular that composer’s Rhenish
symphony, while Rodmell prefers a foretaste of the later sixth symphony
by Dvorak (published 1882), at the same time mentioning press reviews
which wrote of the similarity of the first subject in the first movement
to ‘The Campbells are coming’. Max Bruch’s ballad for soprano, baritone,
chorus and orchestra Schön Ellen Op.23 (1866) ends with
that very song, and could well have been heard by Stanford in Leipzig,
for Bruch was one of the few living composers favoured by Reinecke and
whose music was therefore given performances.
The years 1876 and 1877 were significant for Stanford,
who, in 1876, brought Joachim to Cambridge for chamber music in March,
conducted Brahms’ German Requiem with CUMS in May, attended Wagner’s
first Ring cycle at Bayreuth in the summer, and then went to
Berlin to study with Friedrich Kiel. In May 1877 he conducted a CUMS
concert in which he gave the first British performance of Brahms’ Alto
Rhapsody as well as his own God is our hope, a Psalm in five-movement
cantata form, with, according to Dibble, the hallmarks of a Mus. Bac.
exercise, yet imbued with colourful orchestration, harmonic language
and inventive structures. Despite a breakdown during the performance,
it was the first of his works to receive significant coverage in the
national media, ‘he has the right stuff in him’ said the Musical
Times, though Henry Labouchère in the Truth advised
the composer to ‘let his wings grow longer before he tries such flights’.
There were at least three other important encounters by Stanford at
this time. The first was with Tennyson with whom, through the Poet Laureate’s
sons Lionel and Hallam, he began a long friendship and fruitful collaboration,
starting with the incidental music to the play Queen Mary, the
second was with Hans Richter, who took a leading role conducting the
Wagner Festival at London’s Royal Albert Hall in May 1877 (on p.92,
footnote 11 Dibble omits the sixth concert which took place on 18 May),
and the third was with Jennie Wetton, to whom, after the conclusion
of a year’s enforced separation by Stanford’s father, he was married
in April 1878.
The 1880s continued to beckon a promising future for
Stanford. His opera The Veiled Prophet was given its first performance
in February 1881 at Hanover under Ernst Frank Although plans for Carl
Rosa to stage it in London, or Richter in Vienna came to nothing, he
was far from discouraged and entered into attractive contracts with
publisher John Boosey for two further works, Savonarola and The
Canterbury Pilgrims. The Birmingham Triennial Festival offered him
his first commission for the 1882 Festival (for which he wrote an orchestral
Serenade) and for four further Festivals until 1897 (his Requiem). Rodmell
points out Elgar’s leapfrog over Stanford and Parry to fill the gap
in public and critical acclaim caused by the death of Sullivan in 1900,
when Birmingham commissioned his Dream of Gerontius for that
year’s event followed by The Apostles and The Kingdom
in 1903 and 1906 respectively. But Stanford’s big falling out with Richter
in 1908 (over a trivial misunderstanding of the time of an appointment
with Stanford’s pupil James Friskin) hardly ‘cemented the exclusion’
beyond the following Festival in 1909, for it was Henry Wood, not Richter,
who conducted in 1912, and which also happened to be the last Festival.
Fortunately for Stanford, however, as one door closed another opened,
for he was appointed conductor of the Leeds Philharmonic Society in
1897 until 1909, and of the Leeds Festival between 1901 and 1910, providing
a useful outlet for performances of his own works.
Stanford was appointed to the new Royal College of
Music when it opened in 1883, and made the cardinal error of accepting
payment by the hour, which over the years averaged 15s/75p per hour
for composition, ensemble and opera tuition and a guinea/£1.05p for
conducting orchestral rehearsals. Little wonder this was a decision
he came sorely to regret as the years passed. Rodmell covers the issue
in detail, quoting in full his letter (27 October 1901) to Parry, who
succeeded Grove as Director from 1894, by which time his composition
class had shrunk to three hours a week, while as far as conducting the
orchestra was concerned, ‘if Richter were engaged to conduct a College
concert his fee would be fifty guineas. I get three.’ He requested the
post of Orchestra and Opera Conductor to be salaried, he pointed out
that he took no private pupils, and that the older and more experienced
he was becoming, the less he was being rewarded. The Executive’s response
was to tinker here and there in an effort to mollify him, producing
an increase of some £60 per year, but Stanford was predictably livid
and sulked in his usual manner. He did play a hugely dominant role in
College life, controlling the orchestra, directing its opera department,
but most significantly in his post as Professor of Composition. Taking
these three activities in turn, programmes throughout his 38 years at
the head of the orchestra reflect his preferences for the German repertoire
(especially Brahms and Beethoven), but Tchaikovsky, Glazounov (whom
he admired personally), Berlioz, Franck, Saint Saëns, and Dvorak
were also prominent. The absence of works by Schubert, Haydn, Borodin
and Mussorgsky was generally typical of professional concerts at the
time, but that of Elgar and Richard Strauss was the result of his personal
antipathy towards their music. When it came to British composers, there
was a clear political bias favouring former RCM students, ignoring those
who had studied at the Royal Academy of Music, but he could never be
accused of promoting either his own or Parry’s music. Ravel and Debussy
were rarely played, while Mahler or Stravinsky were totally absent.
In opera his choices were more wide-ranging but for the lack of works
by Puccini and Richard Strauss. A reason might be due to the inability
of immature student voices to cope with their music, yet Wagner’s Der
fliegende Holländer and Beethoven’s Fidelio were staged.
Rodmell lists the operas (generally one each year) Stanford conducted
between 1885-1914, and again, as with the orchestral repertoire, it
favours the German repertoire including rarities such as Schumann’s
Genoveva, and Goetz’s Taming of the Shrew and Francesca
da Rimini, but exceptions were Verdi’s Falstaff (whose premiere
he had witnessed at La Scala, Milan in 1893) and Gluck’s Orfeo
and Alcestis, and two of his own operas, Much Ado about Nothing
and Shamus O’Brien.
It is as a teacher that Stanford’s reputation has endured.
The list of 47 pupils (a few of them at Cambridge rather than the RCM)
compiled by Rodmell makes impressive reading; they include Vaughan Williams,
Holst, Hurlstone, Dunhill, Coleridge Taylor, Ireland, Howells, Rebecca
Clarke, Boughton, Somervell, Rootham, Dyson, Bridge, Toye, Bainton,
Bliss, Gurney, Benjamin, Jacob and Moeran. Given his irascible temperament,
Stanford could be blunt (‘Damned ugly me bhoy’), and brutal (‘All rot
me bhoy’), yet Howells was favoured and described as his ‘son in music’,
while Rebecca Clarke was respected for standing up to him. Stanford’s
questioning of the RCM’s role within the nation’s long-term policy on
music has a distinctly relevant resonance to the situation today, when
he said that ‘foreign nations provide a career before they educate for
it, and do not risk turning out shoals of artists the majority of whom
find, when they have completed their pupillage, that they have no outlet
for their talents’. He no doubt had the German system in mind with plenty
of opera houses to take on singers and orchestral players, a situation
which, until twenty years ago and the unification of Germany, still
prevailed. Stanford confined his work as a teacher of composition to
criticising works by his students once they were written, and making
suggestions as to form, length and orchestration, dicta which he laid
out in his treatise Musical Composition as economy of material,
purity of style, rigid self-criticism, accuracy of instruction to the
performer (dynamics, bowing, tonal variation and degrees of articulation),
variations of texture, freedom through counterpoint, and a grasp of
instrumental characteristics, both solo and in ensemble. Modal counterpoint
was at the heart of the discipline required of his students. ‘Palestrina
for tuppence’ he would call the bus fare required for the journey from
Prince Consort Road to Westminster Cathedral to hear choral services
after they were introduced in 1902. For him ugly music was bad music
and he would have no truck with 20th century developments.
While the music of that other long-lived melodist Bruch (he died as
late as 1920) remained rooted about the mid 1860s, Stanford’s melodic
style progressed by not much more than a decade or two. Dibble points
to his effortless facility of an ‘impeccable sense of balance and presentation’
and his fundamental belief in absolute music. His lyrical response as
a melodist (the Intermezzo in the fourth symphony), his imaginative
instrumentation (the entry of the organ in the finale of the fifth),
his interest in his homeland’s folk music which inspired the orchestral
Rhapsodies, his supreme craftsmanship as a writer of liturgical anthems
still have the power to surprise, and to dismiss his music as ‘Brahms
and water’ is simplistically irrelevant. Both Rodmell and Dibble write
positively of Stanford’s music, the former in more detail with 100 music
examples to Dibble’s 26, but the tireless Dibble has been at the epicentre
of the recordings produced by Hyperion in recent years, after the symphonies
and rhapsodies recorded by Vernon Handley and published by Chandos during
the 1990s. Generally any revival in the music of non-mainstream composers
comes as the result of a biography (such as Clive Brown’s of Spohr in
1984 or my own of Bruch four year later). This was not so with Stanford,
whose revival preceded these biographies, so it would have been useful
for both authors to assess his music in the light of what has been recorded
and made available for the reader to make a judgement. As it is, Dibble
describes the Elegiac Ode (Op.21, 1884 and unrecorded to date)
as ‘Stanford’s most imaginative choral works and merits revival’ and
the forerunner of works by Delius, Holst and Vaughan Williams in the
early twentieth century. Rodmell lists a discography and it includes
a remarkably large number of Stanford’s output of two hundred published
works in all genres, the notable exception being any of his operas.
Rodmell, but not Dibble, covers Stanford’s acrimonious
correspondence with Edmund Garrett over the issue of Home Rule in 1887,
and with Arthur Mann in 1890 about the relationship between CUMS and
Mann’s Festival Choir. The similarity of this name to that of August
Manns of Crystal Palace concerts fame, is made more confusing by Rodmell,
who erroneously makes both into one ‘Augustus Mann’. On the other hand
Dibble’s summary of the importance of Stanford’s Anglo-Irish Protestant
background to the Irishness in his music is cogently described, despite
Shaw’s view that he was ‘too thorough an Irishman to be an ideal Bach
conductor’. While Bax considered Stanford’s Anglo-Irish background disqualified
him from access to the purely Irishness of Ireland, Harry White’s view
(The Keeper’s Recital, Dublin 1998) that ‘Stanford harvested
Irish music strictly as a means of defining his response to a prevailing
European aesthetic’ has a more valid ring of truth about it. As Dibble
points out, Shaw, despite ‘his aversion to Stanford’s use of modality,
of his unabashed prejudice of academia and of religious choral works
in general, retained a sneaking admiration for his countryman’s imagination’,
though it’s hard to find in his review of the oratorio Eden at
Birmingham in 1891, ‘as insufferable a composition as any Festival committee
could desire’. At best Stanford is damned with faint praise when Shaw
wrote, ‘in it you see the Irish professor trifling in a world of ideas,
in marked contrast to the English professor conscientiously wrestling
in a vacuum’. There were, he wrote, ‘traces of a talent for composition’.
Shaw was just as merciless on the subject of Stanford’s conducting,
such as his first attempt at Bach’s B minor Mass on 12 May 1888 soon
after his appointment to the Bach Choir, which he conducted from 1885
to 1902. For reasons of his own Stanford indicated to the audience that
they should stand during the Sanctus, an act dismissed by Shaw as ‘an
imitation of the Hallelujah custom. He is really guilty of a sort of
forgery. Probably however, people will not be so easily persuaded to
stand up when they come to know how long the Sanctus is’. Somehow Shaw
could never shake off his suspicion that musical power in England was
concentrated in the hands of Stanford, Parry and Mackenzie.
Dibble and Rodmell have their stylish quirks, even
adopting phrases of the period such as ‘book’ for libretto (Rodmell
p.208) or ‘assisted by’ for soloists (Dibble p.266), while the quaintly
accurate ‘opera had thriven in Leipzig’ (Dibble p.61) or the one spotted
typo ‘heeling the rift’ (Rodmell p.64) provide a certain charm. Both
authors explore the Stanford-Brahms relationship. Responsible for programming
the first performance in Britain of Brahms’ new first symphony on 8
March 1877 at a CUMS concert when Joachim conducted it in the second
half, we learn that Stanford, despite his unbridled admiration for the
music, did not warm to the personality twenty years later when he met
Brahms in Berlin in December 1895. ‘A big brain I know, and a small
heart, I think’ he wrote to Joachim on 14 January 1896. While Rodmell
goes into more detail than Dibble on the subject of Stanford’s resistance
to the admission of women to degrees at Cambridge, Dibble covers Stanford’s
view on music copyright and publishing leading to the Copyright Act
passed in 1906, and his questioning pamphlet Ethics of Music-Publishing
in England published in the following year, in which he criticised
publishers for only bringing out ‘music that would pay’.
A slight mystery arises through a slip in Dibble (page
137) when he writes that Stanford went to Bayreuth in 1883 to hear Tristan,
Parsifal and Die Meistersinger, the latter under Richter.
In fact, after 1876 Richter did not return to Bayreuth until 1888, and
in 1883 only Parsifal was given (under Levi). Dibble gives this
as the reason Stanford did not conduct his second symphony (Elegiac)
at Gloucester as part of the Three Choirs Festival. Charles Harford
Lloyd was the conductor on 6 September 1883, ‘in the unavoidable absence
of the composer’ according to the Musical Times. Where Dibble
has Stanford at Bayreuth, Rodmell has him hard at work composing Act
Two of The Canterbury Pilgrims between 13 August and 16 September,
but in any event the twelve performances at Bayreuth that year took
place on alternate days between 8 and 30 July, so the Festival was long
over by the date under discussion.
Mention has been made of Stanford’s irascibility, but
his spectacular falling out with Elgar and the stubborn, suspicious
elements in their respective characters as well as their shared paranoia
prevented any genuine, sincere reconciliation. The nature of their relationship
lay somewhere between tragedy and farce. The quarrel seems to have arisen
when Elgar was appointed to the newly created Chair of Music at Birmingham,
and in his first lecture (15 March 1905) he named Parry as the sole
English composer of any stature, going on to ridicule the unnamed Stanford,
the composer of six orchestral Rhapsodies. ‘I think every Englishman
since [Liszt] has called some work a Rhapsody’, he wrote. ‘Could anything
be more inconceivably inept? To rhapsodise is one thing Englishmen cannot
do’. Nothing sums up their quarrel more succinctly than the photographs
reproduced in Rodmell and taken at Bournemouth in 1910 (when Stanford
refused to shake Elgar’s hand) and at the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester
in 1922 (when Herbert Brewer forced the two men to do so), with both
protagonists seated at each end of a row of musical dignitaries.
Stanford was at the heart of the music profession for
half a century as composer, conductor and performer. In 1893 he could
invite Bruch, Saint Saëns, Tchaikovsky, and Boito to Cambridge
to receive honorary doctorates. On other occasions Dvorak, Grieg and
Joachim also came. He met and performed Brahms and Verdi. He conducted
the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, large
choirs and national festivals. He heard his music from chamber music
to opera performed here and abroad, while the roster of his composition
pupils rivals no other teacher. Despite his conservatism in some areas
(new music and the role of women in the profession), he was a notable
reformer in the field of education and did his best (like Richter) to
achieve an English National opera. Rodmell and Dibble have familiar
images of him on the rear dust-jackets of their respective books, Rodmell
chose William Orpen’s 1920 portrait (now at Trinity College, Cambridge)
of Stanford seated in his full doctoral robes and with the hint of a
wry smile playing around his jowled cheeks and small chin, while Dibble
opts for Spy’s chuckling cartoon of him drawn for the April 1904 issue
of Vanity Fair. There’s enough about both to leave one with a
good feeling about the man despite the endless trouble he seems to have
largely brought upon himself. These are highly readable biographies,
between them covering all the details of Stanford’s work and as much
as they can of his life. This was a man who played a far more important
role in the English musical renaissance than he is usually given credit
for.
Dibble includes a wonderful personal memory of Stanford
during the 1880s when he was in his thirties, written in 1933 by Stanley
Peine (S. P.) Waddington, one of his first composition students. At
one and the same time it catches the stimulating yet intimidating atmosphere
of the classroom. ‘The impression he made on me was one of brilliance.
His personality had a sort of splendour, as if the hero of a fairy-tale,
incredibly gifted, miraculously omniscient, had strolled unconcernedly
into a world of ordinary mortals. Until I got used to it, his very appearance
awed me; his tall, loose figure, his slow walk with its short steps,
his fair head rising from the collar of his fur coat, his somewhat unshapely
nose, which one had to admit as a small flaw in his majesty. His speech
added to the wonder he created in me; his Irish brogue grafted on to
a Cambridge idiom, his calm, assured and certain manner of utterance
seemed to me, accustomed to the vigour of provincial dialectics, so
masterly, so ideal! Those were indeed his great days. Gifted, confident,
productive, already important in his sphere, gradually winning favour,
he seemed to have the world at his feet. Evidently high in the counsels
of the College, admired by the Director, esteemed by his pupils, he
was a force such as this generation can hardly realise’.
Christopher Fifield
