THE
P RTAL
November 2012
Page 7
Charles Villiers Anglican
Stanford
Luminary
by Fr Keith Robinson
One really
important aspect of “Anglican Patrimony” which we have not yet explored must surely
be Anglican church music. Music has been extremely formative in the development of what might be called
an “Anglican worship ethos”.
There were the great Tudor composers
of the Reformation period, and
outstanding figures like Purcell at the
Restoration, but by the early nineteenth
century church music, along with much
else, had dropped to a low ebb. The
later nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries saw a restoration of standards
which accompanied something of a
musical renaissance. The hugely gifted
and influential composer who spear-
headed this “renaissance” was Charles
Villiers Stanford. early works he subsequently rejected,
but over 200 works remain. These
include seven symphonies, concertos,
oratorios, songs, anthems and motets
and organ works. He was always very
enthusiastic about opera, but was not
generally regarded as successful in that
genre! His a biding legacy however, has
always been his sacred music, which
has never departed from the English
Church repertoire. Always dominated
by melody, Vaughan Williams spoke of
its “imperishable beauty”.
Cambridge musical scene dictatorial and bad-tempered
Stanford was born in 1852, into a wealthy and
extremely musical family in Dublin. Charles was
sent at an appropriate age to Cambridge to read
Classics, the subject determined by his father, but
he so immersed himself in the Cambridge musical
scene, that he managed to scrape only a rather poor
third class degree. Whilst still an undergraduate he
was appointed Organist of Trinity College, where
he so distinguished himself that he was allowed to
complete further musical studies in Leipzig and Berlin.
Although already formed as a musician in the English
tradition, it was in these places that he met Brahms,
Schumann and Wagner, and in different ways these
great composers began to influence the development
of Stanford’s style. Stanford has something of a reputation for
terseness. He could be dictatorial, bad-tempered and
quarrelsome, and was probably quite bitter about being
somewhat sidelined by his younger contemporaries
Parry and Elgar whom he had previously befriended
and encouraged. When he died in March 1924 his
ashes were appropriately buried in Westminster Abbey,
in the Musicians Aisle (the north choir aisle) close to
Purcell, Croft and Blow. There his soaring melodies
regularly float over his remains to this day.
a huge challenge
Works like his setting of Psalm 150, or his motets
Justorum Animae, or Beati quorum are possessed
of a lightness, a beauty and a spirituality which is
characteristically Anglican. Who would forget his
founding professor
setting of Magnificat in G, with its organ accompaniment
In 1882, at the age of twenty-nine, he became a said to represent the motion of the spinning wheel used
founding professor of the new Royal College of Music, by our Lady to spin the wool for the Temple curtain
and from 1887 also Professor of Music at Cambridge. (which she just happened to be about when Gabriel
As a teacher, a positive galaxy of young British came) and the rapturous solo voice?
musicians passed through his hands: Gustav Holst,
Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Frank Bridge,
This music is not quite like any other music in the
Arthur Bliss, Herbert Howells and Edgar Bainton – all whole of Christendom, and with the Ordinariate’s
names which are familiar from any English cathedral’s extremely limited resources it will be a huge challenge
music list!
to bring it into the Catholic Church with us. But surely
we must try to do this, and I’m glad to say there are
Stanford’s output was prodigious. Many of his already some signs of determination to do so.