Stanford, Charles Villiers
Stanford, Charles Villiers (1852–1924). Irish composer, teacher, conductor, and writer on music. Educated at Cambridge, where he was organist of Trinity College and conductor of the University Musical Society, Stanford studied composition at Berlin and Leipzig and met Meyerbeer, Offenbach, and Brahms, who was a profound influence. A fluent and prolific composer in almost every genre, Stanford was a leader of the late 19th-cent. ‘English musical renaissance’; indeed, as professor at the Royal College of Music from its inception in 1883 (he was also professor at Cambridge from 1887), he taught most of Britain's leading composers, including Vaughan Williams, Holst, Ireland, Bliss, and Howells. Stanford raised standards in British choral music and particularly in Anglican church music. The influence of Irish folk-song is reflected in his six Irish Rhapsodies, the opera Shamus O'Brien (1896), and the third ‘Irish’ Symphony (1887), although his Germanic style has earned the description ‘like leaving and returning to Ireland for a holiday in Germany’.
Eric Cross
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Stanford, Charles Villiers