AN IRISHMAN ABROAD: NATIONALIST AND COSMOPOLITAN CROSS-CURRENTS IN STANFORD’S ORGAN MUSIC

Abstract

Among the great, but mostly hidden, treasures of the late-Romantic organ repertoire is the oeuvre of Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. The neglect of this music (even most organists are conversant with only a small portion, if any, of it) accords with the curious nature of Stanford’s more general reputation. Although his name has never entirely faded from public consciousness – any encyclopaedia article about British musical history will include him – regrettably little of his output has won a big public, except for his contributions to Anglican choralism. Before his non-Anglican works began appearing in large numbers on Compact Disc during the 1990s, the situation was still worse. The present thesis explores several factors that made Stanford’s contributions to organ music distinctive. (Most of these contributions date from well after Stanford ceased playing the instrument on a regular basis.) His Irish upbringing put him at one remove from his English colleagues. Subsequently his German training differed a good deal from the tuition that most English cathedral organists experienced in his own time. Perhaps most important of all was Stanford’s multifaceted activity as a conductor and, most conspicuously, as a pedagogue. Much of the neglect that still surrounds most of his creations is connected to numerous historians’ over-emphasis upon his teaching: an over-emphasis that Stanford’s own son deplored. After supplying in Chapter Two biographical information which indicates the most significant of Stanford’s formative influences, I furnish in Chapter Three details of organ composition in nineteenth-century Europe as a whole, and Victorian Britain specifically. I discuss the symbiotic relationship between increasingly elaborate organ construction – the impact of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll’s structural innovations could be felt well beyond France, as I note in some detail – and the increasingly symphonic character of much nineteenth-century organ music. In addition, I discuss the rise of concert organists, operating outside ecclesiastical environments, and Stanford’s own refusal to undertake regular organ-playing duties after the 1890s. All these factors must be considered in any discussion of Stanford’s works for (to quote Mozart’s phrase) ‘the King of Instruments.’ The fact that Stanford had so complex – not to say agonised – a relationship with both his native land and his adopted land has made it necessary for me to allude, in Chapter Four, to several twentieth-century and twenty-first-century theorists of nationalism. Stanford’s attitude towards music’s past was likewise complex: he avoided both pastiche on the one hand, and on the other hand undue trepidation towards his precursors’ achievements. In Chapters Five and Six, I concentrate on detailed score-based analysis of as many Stanford organ works as the space constraints of a thesis permit me to consider. These two chapters represent the core of the present document (a complete list of Stanford’s organ compositions can be found in an appendix on page 228). Much of the chapters’ content derives from my own experience as an organist in Australia, one whose repertoire – in churches, in recitals, and on CD – has included various Stanford pieces. My approach to the analysis has been to divide the relevant material according to the functions that Stanford had in mind for it: he clearly intended some of it for church use, while some of it (in particular the five sonatas) he just as clearly intended for recital use. With Chapter Seven I trace Stanford’s reception history, which on several counts is unlike that of any other British composer. I examine the wider cultural factors which long made this history problematic, and still other cultural factors (of more recent origin) which suggest that at last Stanford’s time has come. Vaughan Williams’s 1952 prophecy ‘I believe that he [Stanford] will return again’ is more plausible in 2021 than it had been at any time since Stanford’s own death ninety-seven years ago. The concluding Chapter Eight points to further profitable lines of Stanford-related research, and it stresses Stanford’s own importance for those who would seek a more rounded view of Victorian-Edwardian music than habitually prevails.