Stanford, Sir Charles Villiers (1852–1924), composer, teacher, conductor, and organist, was born 30 September 1852 at 2 Herbert St., Dublin, the only son of John James Stanford (1810–80), an eminent lawyer (clerk of the crown for Co. Meath and examiner in chancery), and his second wife, Mary (née Henn), both of Dublin. Charles Villiers Stanford grew up in a stimulating cultural environment engendered by the well educated milieu of his father's friends drawn from Dublin's ecclesiastical, judicial, and medical circles. His father was an eminent amateur bass singer and his mother an accomplished pianist. Musicians were regular visitors to the house, including not only residents of the city such as Robert Prescott Stewart (qv), organist at both Christ Church and St Patrick's cathedrals, and the conductor Joseph Robinson (qv), but also the visiting Joseph Joachim, whom the young Stanford met in 1860 for the first time. While receiving a formal education at Henry Tilney Bassett's school in Lower Mount St., Dublin, Stanford gained his experience as an organist and church musician under the tutelage of Stewart; he studied the piano with the Moscheles pupil Michael Quarry, and in 1862 he took composition lessons with the Irish composer Arthur O'Leary (qv) in London.
In 1870 he won an organ scholarship to Queens’ College, Cambridge, and gained a classical scholarship in June 1871. That same year he was elected assistant conductor of the Cambridge University Musical Society (CUMS) and, in succession to the ailing John Larkin Hopkins, was elected conductor in May 1873. Stanford also assisted Hopkins at Trinity College, where he migrated in 1873, and after Hopkins's death he was appointed organist there in February 1874. The seniority at Trinity generously gave him leave to study in Leipzig for the last six months of 1874 and 1875, where he worked with Reinecke (composition) and Papperitz (piano). Several works, including a violin concerto and two choral works, ‘Die Auferstehung’ and part of Longfellow's ‘Golden legend’, were composed at this time, but, at the instigation of Joachim and with the help of Trinity (who granted a further six months of study leave in 1876), he transferred to Berlin. He returned to Cambridge in January 1877 as the accomplished author of a symphony and theatre music to Tennyson's play Queen Mary (Op. 6), as well as several published songs and pieces for piano. A year later, against the wishes of his father, he married Jennie (Anna Maria) Wetton, fourth daughter of Henry Champion Wetton and Elizabeth Bradshaw Wetton of Ockley, Surrey. Two children came from the marriage: Geraldine (b. 1883) and Guy (b. 1885).
In Cambridge Stanford improved the standards of singing in Trinity College chapel and during his appointment as organist he composed several important works for the choir including the pioneering Services in B flat Op. 10 (1879) and A Op. 12 (1880), the pastoral anthem ‘The Lord is my shepherd’ (1886), and the ‘Three Latin motets’ Op. 38 (c.1888). He also instituted a series of organ recitals in the chapel which became an important focus of musical performance during term time. More significantly, however, was Stanford's pioneering work for CUMS. Having won the battle to allow women to sing in the choir, he began to introduce members of the society and its audiences to new music from the Continent. A red-letter day was the English premiere on 8 March 1877 of Brahms's First Symphony in Cambridge, conducted by Joachim (who received an honorary doctorate from the university). Brahms's music featured prominently in other CUMS concerts along with that of other continental contemporaries, but Stanford also did much to promote the music of his British contemporaries such as Parry, Mackenzie, Goring Thomas, and Cowen, and his own works were also a major attraction. In addition, Joachim was a regular visitor and did much to enhance the work of Stanford and his Cambridge colleagues in the establishment of a regular annual series of chamber concerts (the ‘Wednesday Pops’).
In 1881 Stanford's first opera, ‘The veiled prophet of Khorassan’, was given in Hanover. This and the performance of his Serenade Op. 18 at the 1882 Birmingham Festival attracted the attention of George Grove, who, as the first director of the newly founded Royal College of Music, appointed Stanford professor of composition and orchestral conductor in 1883. Although his success as an opera composer with ‘Savonarola’ and ‘The Canterbury pilgrims’ (both 1884) was mixed, his national and international renown steadily increased with his first major oratorio for Birmingham, ‘The three holy children’ Op. 22 (1885), ‘The revenge’ Op. 24 (1886) for Leeds, his Third Symphony (the ‘Irish’) Op. 28 (1887), conducted by Hans Richter in London in 1887, and a concert entirely of his own music in Berlin in January 1889. It was therefore inevitable that, with the death of Sir George Macfarren in 1887, he would be appointed unanimously to the chair of music at Cambridge University, a position he held until his death.
In 1892 he resigned as organist of Trinity College, though he retained his conductorship of CUMS until the summer of 1893 in order to oversee the society's golden jubilee, an event that brought Tchaikovsky, Bruch, Saint-Saëns, and Boïto to the university for the degrees of honorary D.Mus. London provided Stanford with a more cosmopolitan base for his work as a composer, teacher, and conductor, and from his home at 50 Holland St., Kensington, he produced some of his finest music including the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies (1895, 1905, and 1911 respectively), the Violin Concerto No. 1 Op. 74 (1899), the Clarinet Concerto Op. 80 (1903), the Serenade (Nonet) Op. 95 (1905), the Second Piano Concerto Op. 126 (1911), many songs and song cycles, and much fine church music including the Services in G Op. 81 (1902) and C Op. 115 (1909). He also pursued his lifelong aspiration to be a successful opera composer. During the 1890s he composed three operas, ‘Lorenza’ Op. 55 (1894), ‘Shamus O'Brien’ Op. 61 (1896) and ‘Christopher Patch’ Op. 69 (1897); the first and last remained unperformed, but his opéra comique, ‘Shamus’, was performed to great acclaim in London, the rest of the UK, Australia, and the USA, where it enjoyed fifty performances on Broadway, though it was a failure as a grand opera in Breslau (1907). His fine Shakespearean comedy ‘Much ado about nothing’ Op. 76a (1901), after its London premiere, was staged in Leipzig in 1902; and in September 1915, ‘The critic’ Op. 144, based on Sheridan's comedy, was greatly admired. ‘The travelling companion’ Op. 146 (1916), arguably his most affecting operatic utterance, was not publicly performed until after his death.
In 1897 he was appointed conductor of the Leeds Philharmonic Choir and in 1901, with some controversy, conductor of the prestigious Leeds Triennial Festival. He relinquished the former in 1909 and the latter after the 1910 festival. Honours were conferred on him by the universities of Oxford (D.Mus. 1883), Cambridge (D.Mus. 1888), Durham (hon. DCL 1894), and Leeds (Hon. LLD 1904); he was knighted in 1902, and in 1904 was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin (an honour he was to renounce in 1919). Owing to the sinking of the Lusitania, on which Stanford was to have travelled to the USA, he was unable to receive an honorary doctorate from Yale University; and a combination of ill health and the Irish troubles prevented him from taking an honorary doctorate at TCD ‘by private grace’ in 1921. He died quietly from a heart attack on 29 March 1924 at his home at 9 Lower Berkeley St., London. A funeral service took place on 3 April in Westminster abbey, where his ashes were buried next to the grave of Henry Purcell.
A lively, quick-witted, forceful, and highly articulate man, Stanford was, nevertheless, an irascible, argumentative personality. He fell out with many in his profession (including Parry, Richter, and Elgar); his relationship with Cambridge University was constantly strained, as was his rapport with most of London's most prominent publishers. Stainer & Bell, to whom he gave much support, published a substantial proportion of his works after 1907. He worked tirelessly for particular causes: the institution of a national English opera and the opera class at the RCM; the reform of the Cambridge music degrees; the promotion of British music abroad; musical copyright; and the welfare of his many students at the RCM and Cambridge. An Irish tory, his politics lay to the right, and, though he displayed considerable pride in his Irish nationality (evinced by his numerous collections of Irish folk song arrangements, among them ‘Songs of old Ireland’, ‘Irish songs and ballads’, ‘Moore's melodies restored’ Op. 60, ‘Songs of Erin’ Op. 76, and the monumental ‘Petrie collection’), he was a fervent unionist and British patriot, clear not only from the many ‘loyal’ letters he wrote to The Times but also from his settings of Newbolt's texts in ‘Songs of the sea’ (1904) and ‘Songs of the fleet’ (1910). He loathed Gladstone and the liberals, and, as a supporter of James Craig (qv) and Edward Carson (qv), vociferously opposed home rule for Ireland, a sentiment embodied in the ‘protest’ of the Fourth Irish Rhapsody (also known as the ‘Ulster Rhapsody’) and the embargo he placed on performances of ‘Shamus O'Brien’ in the years before his death.
Though Stanford is perhaps still best known as the teacher of men such as Vaughan Williams, Charles Wood (qv), Holst, Frank Bridge, E. J. Moeran (qv), Coleridge-Taylor, Hurlstone, Howells, Bliss, Gurney, and Dyson, he is now widely admired as a composer of distinction in his own right. Vaughan Williams once described his music as ‘in the best sense of the word Victorian, that it is to say it is the musical counterpart of the art of Tennyson, Watts, and Matthew Arnold’ (‘Charles Villiers Stanford by some of his pupils’, Music & Letters, v (1924), 195). Stanford would have delighted in this appraisal, given his admiration of all three men, yet the best of his musical utterances, with their undated voice and stylishness, have undoubtedly transcended Victorianism and speak with a clarity rarely matched by his British contemporaries or his pupils.
A sketch of Stanford (1893) by Aubrey Beardsley is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a drawing (c.1920) by Sir William Rothenstein is in the National Portrait Gallery, both in London. A portrait (1920) by Sir William Orpen (qv) is in Trinity College, Cambridge; a portrait (1882) by Hubert von Herkomer, formerly in the Royal College of Music, may have been lost. The principal collections of manuscript sources and papers are in the Robinson Library, University of Newcastle, the Royal College of Music, the BL, and the NLI. Smaller but not unimportant collections are in the Royal Academy of Music; Cambridge University Library; Trinity College, Cambridge; Birmingham Public Libraries; Lincoln Central Library; Royal School of Church Music; Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz; Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin; and Moldenhauer Archive, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois.