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Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician

by Jeremy Dibble (Oxford 2002, 535 pp) £65 Amazon

Charles Villiers Stanford

by Paul Rodmell (Ashgate 2002, 495 pp) £57.50 Amazon

These two books have been reviewed for the site by Chris Fifield, who took the occasion to present a quite detailed summary of Stanford’s career. If you can’t stretch to either of these studies, or wouldn’t have time to read them, then go to his review for your basic information on Stanford. The following comments will be dedicated to some considerations arising from the books.

PREVIOUS BOOKS

Paul Rodmell shows justifiable pride in the fact that his is the first full-length study of Stanford since 1935, though he must certainly have been aware that Jeremy Dibble’s book had been in the making ever since he finished his work on Parry in 1992. Dibble, evidently aware that he was going to lose this particular race, makes no special claims. In the event it hardly matters; history will remember that they came out in tandem during the composer’s 150th anniversary year.

That no study had been made since 1935 suggests that the book in question, Charles Villiers Stanford by Harry Plunket Greene (Edward Arnold 1935), must have been a pretty definitive affair, but in reality it has long been a source of frustration to the composer’s admirers, a declaredly partial "Stanford-as-I-knew-him" account by one of his closest friends, prepared in collaboration with Stanford’s widow. It is hazy – when not freely inventive – on dates and chronology, the style is patently not that of a professional writer (Greene was one of the leading baritones of his day), yet it is eminently readable and paints an affectionate and attractive portrait of Stanford the man. Too attractive? Of the many friends, colleagues and professional contacts of the composer who have left some sort of memorial in print, a fair number corroborate Greene’s portrait, but alongside these are the many whom he succeeded in alienating – most famously Elgar – and who quite frankly couldn’t stand the sight of him. Greene doesn’t entirely suppress this fact, but he bends over backwards to demonstrate that Stanford was in every case the injured party. To be fair to Greene, the sort of "warts-and-all" study we expect today was not normal practice at the time, when public men were invariably commemorated with an "X-as-I-knew-him" apologia by a friend or family member. These accounts have little hard value today except as source material for researchers.

Previous to this one other book had appeared, Charles Villiers Stanford by John F. Porte (Kegan Paul 1921), which consisted basically of an introduction and a commented catalogue, in order of opus number, of Stanford’s works. This is a fumbling affair, riddled with inaccuracies, heavy in style, and obviously lacks information about the last few years. However, while it is not definitely stated whether the composer gave Porte any assistance, occasional comments seem to show a degree of inside knowledge, so the book cannot be wholly disregarded. Unfortunately, as late as the 1950s it still formed the basis of the catalogue of Stanford’s works in Grove V. The cataloguing of Stanford’s music was taken up by Frederick Hudson whose "Revised and Extended Catalogue of C. V. Stanford" appeared in Music Review in 1976 and the German MGG encyclopaedia, and thence the New Grove. Alas, this was still very much "work in progress" and contained numerous errors and omissions. However, in the ensuing years, up until his recent death, Hudson made handsome amends, creating the Stanford Archive in the Robinson Library of Newcastle University. The intention, largely realised, was to amass as complete a collection of Stanford material as possible in one place. To this end he persuaded the owners of many autograph scores and other documents to donate or deposit them with the Archive, to which were added photocopies of much other material and a virtually complete run of printed scores, in originals or photocopies. At the same time his catalogue continued to expand, and those who have seen it testify that it is a very scholarly piece of work, with maximum information about performances, dedicatees etc. of each piece. It was virtually completed by the time of his death and it would be nice to think it could be published one day. I have not seen the catalogue in the latest New Grove but I understand it is based on Hudson’s final researches revised by Dibble, and so presume it is similar to the catalogue which appears in Dibble’s own book.

For completeness John Fuller Maitland’s The Music of Parry and Stanford (Heffer & Sons 1934) should be mentioned, and more recently Gerald Norris has published Stanford, the Cambridge Jubilee and Tchaikovsky (David & Charles 1980). This is a racy, readable affair which has to be considered a secondary source in that it seems to be the product of extensive reading of contemporary literature (singers’ memoirs and the like), taking the dates and facts on trust rather than checking them by research. And, last but not least, there is Stanford’s own autobiography Pages from an Unwritten Diary (Edward Arnold 1914) and two other books which bring together most of the articles he wrote for various magazines: Studies and Memories (Constable 1908) and Interludes, Records and Reflections (Murray 1922).

Pages, in particular, makes for very pleasant reading, but Stanford clearly has no wish to bare himself before the public. After a charming account of his family and the Dublin of his youth the book is very much a collection of often vivid portraits of people he met in the course of his career, and possibly more useful for the researcher wanting information about them than for those who wish to know about him. We gather that he was passionately dedicated to obtaining a square deal for his profession, both in terms of recognition and money-wise, and to having his countries’ (both England’s and Ireland’s) musical achievements recognised abroad, and to the cause of opera in England, but that is about it. His family life is kept a closed door and his wife is nowhere mentioned.

PROBLEMS FOR THE BIOGRAPHER

One reason why it has taken so long for a new biography to appear is that Stanford’s stock was so low during much of the post-war period that any book written between 1945 and 1985 would almost certainly not have found a publisher. Another is that anyone considering the task quickly found out that it would be far from easy, much harder than in the case of Parry.

Parry conveniently left a diary covering almost the whole of his life, and also kept most of his letters. For virtually any date we know where he was, what he was doing and what he thought about it. Moreover, his descendents remain at Shulbrede Priory and his papers have been maintained there, so we also know where to look for the basic facts.

Already in 1935 Plunket Greene had to admit defeat in assembling a chronological account. Stanford almost certainly kept no diary (none was found) and seems to have kept a "clean desk", throwing away letters as he answered them, maintaining only a small scrap book of letters from particularly famous people (Greene assures us that "a most thorough search" was made for further correspondence). Plenty of letters from Stanford were made available to Greene, from which it emerged that he only began to date them from the mid-80s. All this led Greene to "abandon the idea of historical sequence and to deal with the Life roughly by periods and subjects".

Admirers of Stanford have been cursing him ever since! To be fair, our notions of research have become more rigorous over the years, but the very paucity of concrete material made it all the more imperative to puzzle out the facts while there were still people around who might remember them. Clearly, things haven’t got any easier today. Even such material as Greene had has partly disappeared, including a series of letters (which he mentions but does not directly quote) between Stanford and his father regarding his future wife and the letters from Stanford to Greene himself, of which he blandly remarks "Some of them, most reluctantly, I cannot quote – he was ever a fighter". Both Dibble and Rodmell state their belief that this material was destroyed during the 1950s. For another difference with Parry is that there are no direct descendants. Stanford’s two children, Geraldine and Guy, both died childless and he himself was an only child (but his wife came from a family of nine, so what about the relations on that side?). Rodmell tells us that the wills of the two children make no mention of papers and that their interests in Stanford’s copyrights were bequeathed to the British Empire Cancer Campaign and the Royal School of Church Music, suggesting that any remaining relatives were distant and uninterested.

Rodmell has located some 800 surviving letters from Stanford; he makes a conservative estimate that he must have written at least 28,000 during his adult life. It would be interesting to have a selection of these published one day, together with some of his many letters to the press, though the absence of the letters which provoked them or replied to them would be limiting. From those quoted by both authors, however, it appears that the letters do not reveal much about the man; many of them deal with practical matters such as terms and conditions for performances and publication of his music. If he ever made even such a conventional cry from the heart as "oh, how I long to get away from it all for a few weeks" (though he did get away from it all, with his family, for a few weeks after his mother died), suffered from Tchaikovsky-like doubts about the adequacy of his own talent, underwent existential, religious or marital crises, not a trace of it survives and any friend who knew kept his mouth tight shut.

So what is the biographer to do? Clearly, a great number of facts can be discovered about the society in which he lived, the people who surrounded him and the music he may have heard. One part of his life is all on the public record since he had an active career as a pianist and organist (in his earlier days) and, more notably, as a conductor (almost to the end of his life) and held appointments with major institutions. He frequently wrote letters to the press and, while he left no evidence in words regarding his inner life, he scrupulously dated his scores. So, on a superficial level it is possible to reconstruct his life, and both Rodmell and Dibble have painstakingly done all this. Do they get us any nearer to the man himself?

THE EARLY YEARS

To start with his early life, both Stanford himself and Greene painted a glowing portrait of the Dublin they had both known and loved, and a modern author could not hope to match this "I was there" quality. What both Rodmell and Dibble have managed to do is to check out the facts (Stanford and Greene mostly relied on memory) and to discuss with the benefit of historical perspective the position of the Anglo-Irish Dublin community of which Stanford was a part. We can now put Stanford’s more personalised account into its proper context.

And yet, though their researches have led to broadly similar results, there are two intriguing differences. Rodmell gives the genealogical tree for both of Stanford’s parents; Dibble doesn’t actually give it in tabulated form but has obviously studied the matter. Both agree that the earliest Stanford about whom we have definite knowledge and from whom Stanford’s own lineage can be traced was a Luke Stanford of County Cavan who died in 1733. Rodmell assumes that this Stanford was of English origin and suggests that a Luke Stanford born in London in 1633 may have been the father of the County Cavan Stanford. Whereas Dibble, relying on information supplied by one of Stanford’s surviving relations, Eileen le Clerc, notes that a Robert de Stanford had been a prior at Christ Church Dublin between 1242 and 1263. This may be wishful thinking on le Clerc’s part and it is unlikely that either hypothesis can be proved now, but it is interesting that the English/Irish contradiction in Stanford rears its head so early in the tale, Rodmell’s theory making him basically an Englishman while Dibble allows for the possibility that his roots may be more purely Irish and above all Celtic.

Two other fascinating points, which only Dibble tells us, are that Stanford’s father John had been previously married to one Harriet Green, presumed to have died young and childless (but as he was 41 when he married Stanford’s future mother the marriage needn’t have been that short), and that Stanford had an elder brother who died young. This last point is potentially important. How young? Could Stanford himself have had any memories of him? If not, was he ever told that he had had an elder brother, and at what age? Here are a number of questions which can probably never be answered, yet which might have a profound bearing on Stanford’s family life and psychological make-up. Could their implications not have been explored a little further, at least to establish the age at which the brother died?

HIS ADULT LIFE

Both authors seem to agree that, in the absence of any knowledge of Stanford’s inner life, his career is mapped out by certain external events which give rise to new chapters: the move to Cambridge, the Royal College appointment and subsequent move from Cambridge, the Leeds Festival and the war. Thus the two accounts are structurally similar, though since there are intriguing differences in their choice of quotations from his surviving letters they do not duplicate one another and I would not be without either. In the last resort, though, the man walks on and off stage, doing his job and composing his music, and it seems impossible to get any closer to him than that. In essence his life is an account of pieces written, performances played and conducted, appointments he held, lessons he gave and people he quarrelled with. Thanks to this latter, the story never becomes dull, whichever version you read, for, as one of his friends said, "Charlie will have his quarrel". However, in the interests of correcting Greene’s rosy picture, I feel that Rodmell in particular has gone out of his way to make him appear as unpleasant as possible. Greene’s view of him as an impulsive, irascible but nonetheless loveable grown-up schoolboy was shared by many of his friends and I am convinced that those who left such opinions in print genuinely felt like that – as did those who considered him a trouble-maker, a climber or even a sham.

I also feel that certain passages from Greene regarding Stanford’s family life and recreational activities might have been referred to more extensively (they are barely mentioned). After all, counterbalancing Greene is all very well if the reader has a copy of Greene, but since the book is long out of print and little would be served by reissuing it, in view of its inaccuracies, perhaps its more valuable parts might have been drawn on more extensively. All the same, both authors produce thoroughly readable accounts.

THE MUSIC

Both writers have elected to incorporate their discussions of the music in the main part of the text, discussing the works as they come up in the story. Rodmell, however, adds some chapters at the end in which he attempts to sum up Stanford’s achievement as a conductor, teacher and composer.

Rodmell admits in the preface that he has a particular interest in the operas, which he discusses in great detail, though it is sad that, in his view, Savanarola and Lorenza, are total write-offs. Dibble, while admitting their shortcomings, is rather more positive. In all truth, it is practically impossible to judge an opera without having seen a first-class production of it in the theatre, and I just hope that Rodmell won’t put anyone off trying!

Rodmell also gives very detailed accounts of the Symphonies, Rhapsodies and several other orchestral works, and I was happy to see him speaking up for the Mass in G (which Dibble barely mentions). On the other hand, he doesn’t seem very much interested in the chamber music, dismissing it as "opaque". The only string quartet I have actually heard played is no.8, which didn’t sound opaque at all; to judge from the scores I don’t see why the first three should do so either; indeed, no.3 is very lean, almost spare in its scoring, though I would agree with those commentators who have found it less thematically distinguished than the first two. These latter, not mentioned by Rodmell, have collected plaudits from writers as different as Bernard Shaw, Thomas F. Dunhill and Geoffrey Bush. Two other works which have been much praised over the years are the First Piano Trio and the Second Cello Sonata, in view of which something more detailed than "Stanford falls victim to his periodic prolixity" seems called for.

Having made a particular study of the songs I had hoped to find here amplification or at least corroboration of my knowledge; here too, Rodmell seems only fitfully interested. Typical is his paragraph on "Cushendall":

Cushendall, which comprises six songs to words by John Stevenson, was Stanford’s first collection of Irish songs since An Irish Idyll and, like the earlier work, does not really succeed. Three of the songs, "Did you ever?", "The Crow" and "Daddy-long-legs", are bland affairs; the quotation of Brunnhilde’s Fire motif in the latter at "You try to moderate your legs in lamp or candle flame" sits incongruously in its surroundings, and while Stevenson’s comparison of a crow with a lawyer would have tickled Stanford, his setting did not add to the poetry. The other three, "Ireland", "Cushendall" and "How does the wind blow?", are better but still lack intensity; "Cushendall", with its long procession of secondary sevenths, has a gentle sense of sorrow, but the climax, despite the poignancy of the words for Stanford, fails to hit the mark [two lines of music are quoted] (p.261).

These are just opinions; what we want to know is, who was John Stevenson, what was Stanford trying to do and by what means did he try to do it? In the light of this, it might be possible to suggest whether he succeeded or failed. I shall not attempt to counteract Rodmell simply by replacing his "bland" with adjectives which describe my own reactions to the music since, unsupported by analysis, my opinions are worth neither more nor less than his: that is to say, nothing at all. Furthermore, Rodmell must have been so cheesed off by the time he got to the end of the sixth song that he didn’t even notice that it is followed by a seventh, "Night" (though this is correctly listed in the worklist at the end of the book).

I feel that Rodmell’s approach to the music is weakened by two assumptions. One is that since he is a critic he has to criticise, and the other is that he takes the "old school" view that Stanford was basically a pretty poor composer; the sum of his two attitudes means that, for each work discussed, he applies a sort of Napoleonic critical code, starting from the assumption that there must be something the matter with it and then tries to find out what it is. This leads, for example, to his observation that "The Blue Bird" is "little short of perfection". Many of us have believed over the years that this, of all Stanford’s works, actually was perfect; since Rodmell has evidently detected a chink in the armour somewhere I feel he might have told us what it is. To be fair, however, he is often perceptive with regard to those works for which he evidently feels sympathy, for example in his defence of the structure of the Irish Symphony’s finale.

Dibble is much more evenhanded; it is nice that he can find space to describe, for example, the Harold Boulton volume which contains "For ever mine", for it is these little corners that bring illumination to the reader. He seems to hold the viewpoint that Stanford was actually a rather good composer and consequently applies habeus corpus, trying to appreciate his aims and methods. I felt his Parry book suffered from an obsession with the idea that musical analysis means listing all the keys a particular work goes through and he has not lost this particular vice, but you can skip those parts. In general, as readers of his notes for a goodly number of CDs will know, he is a helpful guide to what is still unknown territory for most listeners.

GENERAL SUMMING UP

Having reached the end of Stanford’s life, Dibble concludes with a minimum of general comment, indeed, his ending seems a little abrupt; in a further section of some 70 pages Rodmell attempts to sum up Stanford’s achievement.

His conclusions on Stanford as a conductor are unexceptionable except that, in assessing a conductor’s work, it would be a normal practice to take into consideration any recordings he made, yet Rodmell nowhere mentions (and neither does Dibble for that matter) the two sessions which Stanford cut in 1916 and 1923. These have never been transferred to CD but in 1974 Pearl issued an LP containing what they believed to be the complete recordings, though a reference to John Holmes’s massive study of conductors shows that some sides had not been located since Stanford recorded the First Irish Rhapsody complete (Pearl gave us only the first part) and a part of the Irish Symphony (not present on the disc). Admittedly this is evidence to be approached with caution since the sound is obviously primitive and the anonymous (pick up?) orchestra used in 1916 is ropy, but it gains in cohesion as the sessions advance, which surely tells us something, and Stanford’s steady tempo in the Rhapsody shows that he did not want it to sound like an Irish jig (Vernon Handley please note!). The 1923 recording of Songs of the Fleet is rather mysterious since there seems to be no precise date, but it was apparently made late in the year when Stanford had only a few months to live and had officially retired from conducting. At times he seems rather questionably in charge, but he also insists on points of string articulation in The Song of the Sou’ Wester which Norman Del Mar passes over in his EMI recording and adopts a freely rumbustious approach to The Little Admiral which sometimes catches the players by surprise. So at least some audible evidence of his methods exists.

The list of Stanford’s pupils is generally considered to be proof in itself of his effectiveness as a teacher and Rodmell gives us a "selective" (but pretty extensive nonetheless) list of them. He also gives an interesting list of the appointments held by Stanford’s pupils, showing that the British musical world (and beyond if we consider Bainton and Hart in Australia and Friskin at the Julliard School) was dominated by RCM/Stanford products at least until 1945. He quotes extensively from the memories of many of these, then turns devil’s advocate, suggesting that it was Stanford’s good luck, because of his strategic position at the RCM, to have a run of such brilliant names that no teacher could have failed with them. However, he concludes that "Although one could not attribute the extent of Stanford’s influence to a design of his own making, without him the direction taken by British composers in the first half of the twentieth century might have been very different".

Rodmell then turns to the music itself. In view of the fact that Stanford held that good orchestral music must sound effective on the piano (in other words it must not depend on orchestral colour to make it sound better than it is) perhaps he would not have been unduly flattered by the fact that Rodmell singles out his orchestration as one of his particularly successful points. And yet it is true; the experience of hearing a performance with orchestra of a choral/orchestral work which one has only known in vocal score can be remarkable, the richness and the colour adding a dimension one would not have suspected. The first part of Rodmell’s chapter on "Stanford the Composer" concludes that there is "a mode of expression which can be highly individual and unmistakably Stanfordian"; he points in particular to the composer’s use of appoggiatura and of flatwards modulation. There is still an infinite amount of work to be done here but these are certainly valid starting points.

Rodmell next considers Stanford’s claims to be considered Irish. The whole question of nationality and music is fraught with pitfalls, and if the question of the Anglo-Irish status (were they English or Irish?) is added, then politics enter the picture as well. I may be naïve, but it seems to me that things have come to a pretty pass if a man whose Irish ancestors can be traced back to at least 1733 cannot be considered an Irishman of some sort. By this argument, most of the men who shaped the rise of American music during the 20th Century were not Americans at all!

Perhaps this is all a red herring. A more profitable line of inquiry might be to seek the common characteristics of composers who have a proven Celtic lineage and then see if Stanford’s music shares these characteristics. Stanford the Celt, as opposed to Stanford the Irishman, is not discussed by Rodmell.

Finally, Rodmell assesses the decline of Stanford’s reputation, and produces two interesting tables showing the years in which various works by Stanford were withdrawn from sale, and the sales of vocal scores of The Revenge from 1886 down to 1974. This information comes from the Novello Archive in the BL; it’s a pity that similar information from Stanford’s other publishers was not available. For example in about 1972, when I set about buying copies of all that remained in print, whereas Novello and Boosey had precious little left in their catalogues, Stainer & Bell still had a large selection, so it would be interesting to know how much of it they were actually selling. This chapter concludes with a discussion of certain points which have dogged Stanford’s reputation over the years; his fluency, the anachronistic nature of his style and his respectability. I must say I find much of this general summing up repetitive and inconclusive and I wonder if any of us really know the music enough yet – and over a long enough period for it to be a part of us in the way that Brahms or Dvořák are – to be able to make the sort of sweeping conclusions at which Rodmell aims. I suggest Dibble was wise to avoid such an attempt.

Both authors provide a worklist. Rodmell’s is a "Select list of works" in chronological order, which means all those with opus numbers plus a fair number of others inserted among them. Unfortunately he gives many titles without any indication as to what the work actually is, so the reader faced with Lorenza, Prince Madoc’s Farewell, Phaudrig Crohoore and Six Elizabethan Pastorals is left to find out as best he may that they are, respectively, an opera, a song for voice and piano, a cantata for chorus and orchestra and pieces for unaccompanied SATB choir. Some of this information can be hunted down in the body of the text, but not all. Composition dates and the whereabouts of the manuscript are given; where the manuscript is missing and the date is printed at the foot of the printed score he sometimes includes it but a good many more completion dates could have been obtained this way (see below). Likewise, in the cases where the only clue we have to the composition date is the date of publication, he sometimes includes it but more often does not. He gives the original publishers, but frequently gives them wrongly, and the date of the first performance. Here, too, his information often clashes with Dibble’s though I am in most cases unable to say who is right. He also gives a list of CDs currently available and I feel that this is just wasted space; the shelf life of a book will probably be for the remainder of the owner’s life and beyond while the CD scene is very volatile and the list is out of date even now. A search in Internet or a visit to a good dealer will provide the interested reader with information as to what is available at any given moment.

Dibble’s worklist is by category and aims to be complete (I have detected a few omissions and errors; see below). For evident reasons of space the layout is cluttered and details of individual pieces in a set (for example the single songs in a cycle) are not given. Both authors provide, as well as a general index, a separate index of references to specific works. Using this has alerted me to a possible problem with Dibble. Having begun his discussion of the works and activities of Stanford in a specific year, he then proceeds, maybe for several pages, "on February 7th … three weeks later …. In early May …. Towards the end of the following month". This is fine when you are reading the book consecutively, but I suspect that most readers, having read it once, will use it above all as a reference book, and at times, having looked up a reference, I had to go back several pages to see which year he is talking about. I wonder if a future edition might revise this point?

I have the impression that the 150th anniversary year arrived all too quickly for both authors. A further reading might have weeded out such repetitions as "over the succeeding years his involvement with Cambridge had steadily reduced, such that his involvement had come down to the bare minimum" (Rodmell p.326), not to speak of the following account of a posthumous holiday by Mr. and Mrs. Liszt (or is it an early death by Stanford?):

Liszt left London for Bayreuth but by the time Stanford arrived there to hear performances of Tristan and Parsifal under Mottl in August he was dead. After Bayreuth he and his wife spent some time in Berchtesgaden … (Dibble p.177).

Fifield has already pointed out Jennie Stanford’s "heeling the rift" with Parry (Rodmell p.64), with its delightful image of her forcing both men into line with a sharp dig from her stilettos, or whatever small women wore those days, but better still is "The Handy Norsewoman" (instead of "Hardy"; Rodmell p.330). Who needed Jennie Stanford when he had that?

Worse than these obvious slips, there is an alarming number of discrepancies between the two books over dates and even quite important facts, such as the Stanfords’ honeymoon or whether the music to Queen Mary was eventually performed or not. I had intended to add a list of these as a footnote, but there are so many – well into triple figures - and this review is already so long that I have decided to post it as a separate article. Seriously, I hope both authors will see this list and check their sources in the hope that future editions might be more accurate.

So which to buy? If you’re really keen on Stanford, each has important information not included in the other. If it must be only one, then Dibble has a remarkable knack of inserting maximum information in a single sentence, a more even treatment of the works and a fuller worklist. And where to go from here? As far as the life is concerned, unless some new source of exceptional interest were to come to light, it would probably be superfluous for a third writer to enter the lists, if only the discrepancies referred to above could be cleared up. Until this is done, the reliability of either book is questionable. As for the music, we are still at the beginning and the is plenty of scope for further studies. I would like to set the ball rolling by posting an article on "The Triumph of Love" which is extracted from an unpublished (and, without drastic revision, unpublishable) book I wrote on Stanford’s songs in 1994. As both writers have pointed out, we know nothing about Stanford’s more intimate personal feeling towards his wife, and neither of them have picked up the fact that this work (about which Rodmell is scathing and Dibble offers no comment) coincided with his 25th wedding anniversary. In view of the involvement of Edmond Holmes, the author of the texts, with their pre-marriage period this can hardly be a coincidence so perhaps something can be gleaned from a study of this work? I also wish to make more widely available two articles which I published in British Music Society News some time ago, "Stanford and Musical Quotation" and "Stanford’s Couples", since I feel that both of them suggest lines for further enquiry. So the interested reader will shortly find the following material posted on the site:

Errors and discrepancies in two recent books on Stanford

Stanford, Edmond Holmes and "Triumph of Love"

Stanford and Musical Quotation

Stanford’s Couples

Christopher Howell

 

Charles Villiers Stanford: Man and Musician by Jeremy Dibble (Oxford 2002, 535 pp) £65
Charles Villiers Stanford by Paul Rodmell (Ashgate 2002, 495 pp) £57.50 [CH]
ERRORS AND DISCREPANCIES IN TWO RECENT BOOKS ON STANFORD
STANFORD, EDMOND HOLMES AND "THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE"
STANFORD AND MUSICAL QUOTATION

 

 

 

 

 

 

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