Stanford education.(Book Review)

Paul J. Rodmell Charles Villiers Stanford. Ashgate Publishing, +94 pages, $99.95

Posterity has not so much neglected Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) as derived malicious satisfaction from ostentatiously yawning in his face. Late Victorian and Edwardian Englishmen, in whose estimate he ranked with the greatest modern composers, would have thought such a development grotesque. Yet the astonishing fact remains: Paul J. Rodmell's is the first detailed biography of Stanford, indeed--save for a chatty, somewhat anodyne, repeatedly inaccurate 1935 encomium--the first Stanford biography of any kind. (A second, from Oxford University Press, appeared in January 2003.) At least England has done Stanford belated homage. His native Ireland appears to have forgotten his very existence, although no one should underestimate the problems involved in selling an uncommunicative, virtuous, sardonic Protestant Anglophile to the Mary Robinson market.

Even in his own lifetime Stanford suffered from being repeatedly bracketed with Sir Hubert Parry, rival and colleague at London's Royal College of Music. This ill-advised yoking typifies that critical laziness which so often has welded together the most disparate musicians in spurious alliances (Debussyravel, Donizettibellini, Sibeliusnielsen). In truth, Stanford and Parry felt for the most part a gentlemanly mutual dislike, unsurprising to those who knew both. Stanford's outlook bore the same relationship to Parry's which Macaulay's bore to Gladstone's; it possessed, in other words, enough eighteenth-century realism to debar him from Parry's tendencies toward nebulous demagogic uplift.

Really, the two men shared only one artistic trait: an itch that flared up at the very sight of blank manuscript paper. Both were far too prolific for their own good, and while Stanford--unlike Parry--never voiced a willingness to set the whole Bible to music, he tackled all genres then prevalent, leaving in total more than zoo pieces. Of these, all but a dozen are now entirely overlooked. The dozen heard occasionally are, at their strongest, good enough to prompt curiosity about what their hordes of unremembered siblings might sound like: curiosity sharpened by Rodmell's scrupulous, sometimes tart analyses (he deems one operatic juvenilium "embarrassing"). Stanford's Irish Rhapsodies brought a new, if faint, note of exotic color to orchestras' repertoire; his finest unaccompanied motets, such as Beati quorum via, attain neo-Brucknerian sublimity; and a few solo songs, notably A Soft Day, stand not far below their best German and French counterparts. Yet what an alarming disproportion between Stanford's efforts, and his lasting fame! Hibernian chauvinists, as Rodmell demonstrates, ascribed Stanford's frequent stylistic blandness to insufficient wearing of the green. A likelier explanation is sheer fatigue, since he churned the stuff out too fast to care overmuch about whether it would echo down the ages.

The consensus is that Stanford, whatever his creative timidity, showed consistent genius in his Royal College of Music teaching. Certainly he acquired an ...