Charles Villiers Stanford learnt the piano and organ as a child from well-known teachers in Dublin and made contact with composers and musicians there, such as Arthur Sullivan, when the family travelled to London in 1864.
Stanford studied from 1862 in London with Ernst Pauer and Arthur O’Leary, from 1870 at Queens’ College in Cambridge, from 1874 to 1876 with Carl Reinecke in Leipzig and Friedrich Kiel in Berlin. From 1883 he taught composition at the Royal College of Music in London, and from 1887 he was Professor of Music at Cambridge University.
Together with Hubert Parry and Edward Elgar, Stanford made a decisive contribution to the renewal of English music towards the end of the 19th century (“English Musical Renaissance”). Stanford remained Professor of Composition at Cambridge and London until his death in March 1924. Like many important English musicians, he was buried in Westminster Abbey. His tombstone bears the inscription “A great musician”.
Although his own compositional output is very extensive, only a few of his works are still performed today. Of his more than 30 choral works, only the liturgical works are still in the repertoire of English church choirs today. His choral symphonic works have largely been forgotten. In recent years, however, the Requiem (1897) and the Stabat mater (1907) have become known to a wider public through CD recordings (Naxos and Chandos respectively). At the end of the 1980s, the British record company Chandos recorded all the symphonies and Irish Rhapsodies for compact disc with the Ulster Orchestra under the direction of Vernon Handley. Since the beginning of the third millennium, the Irish RTÉ Vanbrugh Quartet has been recording selected chamber music by Stanford for Hyperion.
Stanford’s “seascapes” – the ballad The Revenge – A Ballad of the Fleet, op. 24, after Alfred Lord Tennyson and the vocal cycles Songs of the Sea, op. 91 and Songs of the Fleet, op. 117 – were extremely popular in their day. The 3rd Symphony (“Irish”) was one of the most popular Romantic symphonies for a number of years and was also in Gustav Mahler’s conducting repertoire.
Some of his compositions show strong echoes of the music of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms. At the same time, Stanford was a pioneer in the direct use of Irish folk music in his six Irish Rhapsodies and the 3rd Symphony, which also bears the subtitle “Irish”. In doing so, he paved the way for the “Pastoral School”, whose exponents included Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, both of whom were Stanford students. In addition to Stanford’s compositional work, it should not be underestimated that he was also active as a conductor (including Cambridge University Musical Society and Leeds Festival). His pupils included Arthur Bliss, Herbert Howells, John Ireland, George Dyson, Ernest John Moeran, Rebecca Clarke and the conductor Eugene Goossens.
Stanford composed seven operas, seven symphonies, six Irish Rhapsodies, eight Irish Dances, three piano and two violin concertos, a cello concerto, a clarinet concerto, chamber music works, piano and organ music, two oratorios (“The three holy Children” and “Eden”), a mass, a Te Deum, a Magnificat, a Requiem, a Stabat mater and numerous songs.