Charles Villiers Stanford.(Book Reviews)(Book Review)

Charles Villiers Stanford, by Paul Rodmell; pp. xx + 495. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2002, [pounds sterling]57.50, $99.95.

Even before his death at the age of seventy-one in 1924, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford had become something of a relic from a past age--a Victorian transplanted into the alien soil of post-1918 Britain. For a man who, for over forty years, had been at the forefront of British musical life this was not a happy experience, as it had all begun so differently. Born the only child of an Anglo-Irish lawyer and talented amateur singer, he had grown up in the cultured world of mid-nineteenth-century Dublin. Music figured large in his childhood and it was as a choral scholar that he entered Queen's College, Cambridge, to read classics, in 1870. Cambridge provided his entree into the British musical establishment and his seemingly inexorable rise began. The facts speak for themselves: Stanford was appointed conductor of the Cambridge University Musical Society and Organist of Trinity …