Not Cricket

Karl Baedeker​ wrote in his 1868 guide to Venice that when sitting outside the twin cafés of Quadri and Florian in St Mark’s Square, ‘strangers have here to submit to, with the best grace they can, the importunities of flower-girls, hawkers, musicians etc.’ He could have written ‘buskers’ – the word was in use by then – but he didn’t. Musicians have long been condescended to. Confined to a lower stratum of artistic endeavour than artists or writers, they have often been presumed to be socially inferior, too, mere entertainers possessed of cunning tricks. Two hundred and fifty years after Michelangelo had earned his living as a freelancer, Joseph Haydn was still the liveried servant of a princely family. The typecasting has fluctuated according to culture, but the most telling example was the attitude in Britain in the 19th century. As the British built their empire, anything that was held to be unmanly in society was condemned and ostracised. The Catholic church, and all the culture that went with it, was a leading candidate. In a letter of 1851, Charles Kingsley wrote of Cardinal Newman that ‘in him and in all that school there is an element of foppery – even in dress and manner; a fastidious, maundering, die-away effeminacy, which is mistaken for purity and refinement’ – and blamed the aristocracy for falling for it. In this view the humiliations of the Crimean War were a direct consequence.

The music of the Oxford Movement came quickly into the firing line. Looking back in 1889 the Musical Times complained:

Few things have contributed more effectively to perpetuate in this country the prejudice against the musical profession … than the impression that musicians are as a class wanting in the manlier qualities. In a country like England, where devotion to athletics forms a cardinal tenet of the national creed, such an impression cannot fail to have operated greatly to the prejudice of the art – indeed, of all arts, for there are many excellent people with whom the term ‘artist’ is simply a synonym for ‘Bohemian’ or ‘black sheep’. They are so firmly persuaded that exclusive devotion to the study of music is inevitably attended by a weakening of moral and physical fibre that they avoid all personal contact or association with such persons. In some cases that we know of this feeling amounts to a positive repugnance and resentment.

The author goes on to instance the poor behaviour of opera singers – ‘By a sort of freak of nature, a splendid voice is often implanted in a person of less than mediocre intelligence’ – but, apart from a general desire to belittle female musicians, a major concern was the effect singing church music might have on young men. A.H. Peppin wrote as late as 1927 that one music master he had recently interviewed suspected that ‘a great many of the boys and a good many of the masters’ regarded music with indifference, and some with ‘positive contempt’, since musicians as a class were thought to be ‘maiden ladies and foreigners with long hair, and educated Englishmen did not sing’. Sir William Henry Hadow, a leading educational reformer after the First World War, remembered the schooling he had received in the 1870s by noting that music had been

the reluctant substitute for cricket, all the more bitter because it carried the suspicion of an unmanly preference; the hours of drudgery to which no intelligible aim was propounded; the lack of discipline and authority; the whole subject regarded as alien and superfluous, commonly treated with a sort of disdainful toleration, but not admitted within the customary frontiers of citizenship.

This prejudice was reinforced by the fact that ordinary cathedral lay clerks were generally not well educated, and cathedral organists in the 19th century were not university men. Peppin goes on: ‘Music still had no recognised place in any public-school curriculum. And should teenage boys be singing at all? Victorian choir-trainers had had doubts about the wisdom of allowing boys to sing for several years during the change of voice for fear of inflicting permanent damage.’ He wasn’t thinking of castrati.

This unsympathetic judgment has had a long run. I remember the jibes about long-haired, effeminate musicians when I was at school, and the notion that music is really only a suitable pursuit for women is still to be found as a lazy assumption among the British intelligentsia (in my experience it is not so ingrained in our counterparts abroad). Much as, in Rosemary Hill’s words, a 17th-century mason, ‘however skilled, had a status roughly on a par with a farmer’, musicians were not scholars and gentlemen until the age of Stanford, Parry and Elgar.

The practical effect of this class distinction was to delay until the late 19th century any hope of raising the standard of native composition or performance, even in church. The process couldn’t have started from a lower bar. By 1850 Britain had not produced a single composer of any worth, with the possible exception of S.S. Wesley, since the death of Purcell. Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn had come and gone, enslaving the much denigrated local talent and reducing its effectiveness still further. Meanwhile every other branch of classical music-making was treated at best as an amateur activity. This dearth led to the famous remark that England was ‘das Land ohne Musik’, the title of an anti-English polemic written in 1904 by the German bohemian Oskar Schmitz. By that point, as Paul Serotsky has remarked, ‘this was already no longer true. However, when the idea – that England was the only cultured country without its own music – was first mooted in 1866, it held more than a grain of truth. England, probably too busy with the Industrial Revolution and what-have-you, seemed to have tucked its indigenous “classical” music away in the cloisters.’

Even those cloisters had not been encouraging. Sydney Smith, a canon of St Paul’s from 1831 until his death in 1845, complained that ‘it is enough if our music is decent … we are here to pray, and the singing is a very subordinate consideration.’ Churches of most denominations proceed along those lines to this day, but not the Church of England. Around the beginning of Charles Villiers Stanford’s career – he went up to Cambridge in 1870 – the place of music in Anglican worship began to change, becoming ever more synonymous with official state worship: something that required a certain extrovert bravura, incisive word-setting and loud organs. The demands of empire had turned the tables; music could now go hand in hand with young men who won battles.

It helped that the British establishment had not only wanted to promote the Anglican church in the colonies, but had decided the music associated with it was fit for purpose, especially those examples written by Elgar. Handel had shown how to write ceremonial religious music, and although the composers of the hundred years after his death failed to learn from him, by the time the Victorians wanted grand writing – one thinks of Parry’s ‘I was glad’, written for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902 – there were composers good enough to provide it. There was a coming together from 1870 onwards of the music that was being written for Anglican services, the attitude of the authorities to it and the social standing of the composers involved. This can be seen in the rapid social advancement of the organists at the two principal London choral establishments – St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. The old non-university keyboard player gave way to masters with knighthoods. This didn’t necessarily make them good composers, of course, but their standing and visibility in society rose and with it the standing of classical music more generally. The first organist at St Paul’s to receive a knighthood was John Goss, though he had to wait until his retirement in 1872. After that new organists often got one immediately. The pattern at the abbey was very similar: James Turle was the last of the old type, having been organist there for 51 years, starting in 1831, without official acknowledgment. His successor, Frederick Bridge, was knighted in 1897. Again, every subsequent organist was so recognised until the run ended with William McKie, knighted after he had conducted at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953.

The person to whom most credit should go for moderating this traditional prejudice and opening the door to a new era of composition was an Irishman. Stanford was born in Dublin in 1852 to a musical family: his father was a cellist and bass, who had sung the title role in the Irish premiere of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, and his mother was a well-regarded pianist.

Stanford was among the first composers in Britain to write church music that was not automatically relegated to the background; and it was Stanford who, through being professor of music at both Cambridge and the Royal College of Music in London (at the same time) raised the teaching of music at university to put it on a par with other more respected subjects. Most remarkable was his fluency as a composer. Jeremy Dibble’s newly revised biography has a list of his complete works, which runs to 43 pages: seven symphonies, nine operas, four piano concertos, three violin concertos, one concerto each for cello and clarinet, five organ sonatas, eight string quartets and many sonatas for piano and strings, other songs and miscellaneous chamber music without number. It is ironic that the section dedicated to his liturgical Anglican music – the only body of his music regularly performed today – is one of the shortest. His current reputation rests on two Evening Services (in F and E flat), six more Morning, Communion and Evening Services (in B flat, A, F, G, C and D), 25 anthems, four mass-settings, a Latin double-choir Magnificat and various carols and hymn tunes.

We can see with hindsight that Stanford’s greatest achievement as a composer was to write, at just the right historical moment, the kind of Anglican service music that appealed to the churchgoers of his time, an appeal which has lasted. For more than a hundred years this repertoire has been found to have just the right mix of academic solidity, catchy melodies, unthreatening harmonies and effective sweep. It is worth underlining that this renaissance owed nothing to the German performance tradition, which was based in the teaching at conservatoires. It was a specifically British event, rooted in the practice of robed choirs of men and children, singing almost daily in at least 35 foundations around the country. This practice has continued to the present day – despite the lack of a strong religious sensibility in the public and the inevitable shortage of cash – and has been extended recently to involve girl choristers alongside the boys, so enhancing its unique educational value. Evensong has become more of a cultural icon than a religious event. As Richard Dawkins, no theist, put it, ‘I’m a cultural Anglican and I see evensong in a country church through much the same eyes as I see a village cricket match on the village green.’

But Stanford hadn’t set out to be only a church music composer. He had much grander ambitions, which centred on becoming part of the German orchestral tradition, something he hoped would bring him instant recognition and respect. Certainly it can have done his reputation in England no harm to be seen going to Germany on repeated visits throughout his career, and having his music conducted by the leading practitioners there, in particular Hans Richter and Hans von Bülow. (He was less fortunate with the leading composers. Wagner eluded him; and although he met Brahms when he was a young man in 1873, Brahms was in a bad mood and dismissive.) But the two conductors and the violinist Joseph Joachim were enthusiastic about Stanford’s large-scale orchestral writing, and performed it in Berlin and Leipzig as well as in England. Thus encouraged, Stanford continued in this way until after the First World War, when no one wanted his music any more, neither publishers nor audiences, his German mentors were dead, and he himself realised he was out of date. But to judge from the catty comments made by his rivals in England – especially by Parry and Elgar, who had largely taken the same professional route – his hobnobbing with eminent foreigners probably helped to establish Stanford’s purely Anglican music in a way nothing else could.

One misunderstanding about Stanford’s compositions is that they are irredeemably ‘Victorian’, and so must be cloying to our ears. In fact, there is very little of the saccharine chromaticism that makes up so much of the music of Maunder, Ouseley, Goss and Stainer. Listening to Stanford’s symphonies – there is a complete set of the seven recorded by Vernon Handley and the Ulster Orchestra on Chandos – the overriding impression is that they are fluent, outward-going, joyful works (the facility with which they were written giving that sense of joy). If one wanted a comparison, the obvious starting point would be Mendelssohn. There is the same easiness of composition, the same sense that happiness is inevitable and reliable, that even after stormy emotional moments, everything will be all right again. The problem with Stanford is not so much harmony as melody, which sometimes flows too easily and can’t be turned by the performers to effective ends. Stanford was very good at musical structure – his academic training ensured that – and he was also good at rehashing the idioms of his peers, without necessarily putting much of himself into the mix. This is where the most trenchant criticism of him lies: facile melodies bolted onto fail-safe musical grids, a kleptomaniac composer, who simply wrote too quickly to achieve anything lasting and had little to say. The most appreciated of all his borrowings was not from a contemporary Romantic composer but from Bach, in an a cappella setting of the Magnificat in Latin. No one has ever objected to the provenance of this magisterial work, suggesting that the same judgments are not applied to choral writing. The real answer may be that, hard as this Magnificat is to sing, it has remained in the general repertory and not been dismissed along with the rest.

But​ there is a long way to go with Stanford’s legacy. This many melodies cannot be judged quickly, and his sense of form meant he knew how to develop those melodies, and build whole movements out of them. Composers have borrowed from each other since time immemorial: if Stanford’s Second Piano Concerto sounds in places like Rachmaninov, why should we sneer? There is plenty in the score to recognise Stanford as an individual thinker. It is our task to find those moments without giving up because we suspect they will be too Victorian to be taken seriously.

The only major issue I have with Dibble is his account of Brahms’s influence. Among other obvious clues to his admiration, Stanford quoted the slow movement of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony in the slow movement of his own Third – and ‘Brahmsian’ is an adjective often deployed by writers on Stanford. But this is easily said, and despite Dibble’s 700 pages, I couldn’t pin down exactly what is meant by it. My search has not been helped by the index, which gives page references to Brahms over nearly a whole column, not one of which is accurate. This index is often inadequate, but the worst blight seems to affect composers whose names begin with ‘B’, yielding the counterintuitive result that when one follows the index it is impossible to follow a line of research. Brahms is the most serious casualty.

Stanford’s tendency to borrow from German masters was not appreciated by those who wanted something more emotionally taxing from their composers. George Bernard Shaw was one such critic, though he found a more subtle explanation for his discontent than blaming Stanford for overhasty thought and cheap plagiarism. He noted in him ‘a record of fearful conflict between the aboriginal Celt and the Professor’, wishing Stanford had remained true to his Irish roots and broken free of academic constraint. He believed that Stanford was good at being ‘passionately sad about nothing’, the result of ‘a genteel, cultured, classic’ piety. One Irishman could clearly see the faults of another when in England, but Stanford’s faults were evident to native English writers, too. Martin Cooper, reviewing a performance of Stanford’s Stabat mater in Hereford in 1952, killed off the idea of founding a Stanford Society: ‘So long as no odious comparisons obtruded themselves, no unprejudiced listener can have failed, I think, to enjoy and then forget the eminently respectable music.’

And there the matter rested till the end of the century. The Anglican church has kept Stanford in view. A Stanford Society was eventually founded in 2007 by Dibble and others; and Dibble has worked hard to establish a more international view of his subject, praising the ‘revival of his symphonies, concertos, chamber music, choral works such as the Requiem, the Te Deum, Stabat mater and the epic Mass Via Victrix, many of the magnificent songs and several of the operas.’ He quotes Vaughan Williams’s remark that Stanford’s work ‘is in the best sense of the word Victorian, that is to say it is the musical counterpart of the art of Tennyson, Watts and Matthew Arnold’. No mention of the pre-Raphaelites, who presumably exemplified the worst sense of ‘Victorian’.

Stanford was the most ubiquitous and influential musician in the country for several decades. Among many other things he helped to establish the idea of an English National Opera, subsidised by the state, and was the first composer in England to use folksong in a symphony. He was relentless in his determination to improve the standing of his students, fellow professionals and English composers more generally, so that by the turn of the 20th century it had become impossible for them to be treated as dismissively as they once had been, whether by English society or German commentators. But I prefer to remember him as a composer. Whatever we may make of those scores waiting to be explored, and whatever we may think of his Anglican service music, Stanford was capable, across the board, of inspirational flashes quite out of the ordinary. At the end of a recent concert I had decided to present his ‘Blue Bird’ as an encore. It is a part-song, innocent of religious teaching. As is usual with the non-Renaissance pieces my group performs, the singers knew the music better than I did, and I wasn’t going to waste their time rehearsing it just so that I could learn it – I could see that there was nothing in the score to trouble me as a conductor. I started the piece with a smile of toleration, and ended it in tears. It is one of the greatest miniatures in the repertoire, its length perfectly calculated to contain the emotion of the text. Take the bass F flat away in the sixth bar from the end, or extend the music by just a few seconds, and the magic would be dissipated.