This year was Holst’s 150th birthday, but it also marked the centenary of the death of his teacher, Charles Villiers Stanford. 

If you’ve never heard of Stanford, that’s probably because he suffered from a reputation, unfairly earned early on, for being too much the teacher, too academic, too hidebound by rules to be interesting. In a broadcast speech commemorating Stanford’s centennial, Ralph Vaughan Williams, another of his students, pointed to an article by George Bernard Shaw, who took aim at Stanford for being part of an “‘academic clique.’” Vaughan Williams defended Stanford but was measured, ceding that there was a “certain amount of dull music” in Stanford’s oeuvre, and describing his orchestration as “perhaps unadventurous,” even as praises his ability to remain “always within the bounds of classical beauty.” 

You’d expect a precocious and rebellious student like Vaughan Williams to stick it to his teacher a bit, and it is true that much of Stanford’s music evokes late-19th-century contemporaries, but I see this ability to take familiar sounds and refine them to be Stanford’s superpower. He knows the codes of this music so well that he can use it to his advantage, combining them in unusual ways and bending them to meet his needs. And he does this while always maintaining a level of polish that few composers of his age possessed (certainly not Vaughan Williams). 

Stanford’s Songs of the Sea for baritone, male voice, and orchestra received its premiere in 1904 at the Leeds Festival, where the composer was artistic director. There are plenty of stereotypical sea-shanty sounds and Royal Navy puffery in the cycle, such as in the opening “Drake’s Drum,” which recounts the legend of a magical drum owned by Sir Francis Drake. But there are also moments of real tenderness, such as “Outward Bound,” a plaintive farewell from a sailor “in exile on the eternal sea” to his mother. The song ends with a choral swell that will leave you breathless from the lump in your throat. 

Songs of the Sea ends with the rollicking “Old Superb” about a beat-up, out-of-date ship in Nelson’s fleet whose crew refuses to give up the fight during the Napoleonic Wars (Master and Commander: Far Side of the World is set at the same time, with a similar chase-the-French-and-save-the-Empire plot). It’s swashbuckling but also comic in depicting the sad shape of the “Old Superb” and the never-say-die attitude of its crew. Stanford depicts this perfectly through the music: it sounds like a Gilbert and Sullivan chorus orchestrated by Brahms, triumphant and madcap at the same time. 

One place where you’ll still hear Stanford’s music regularly is in Anglican churches, as he wrote a seemingly endless stream of anthems and canticles. Beati quorum via, the last of his Three Latin Motets, Op. 39, published in 1905, is a popular church anthem, a setting of the first two lines of Psalm 119: Blessed are those whose way is blameless, who walk in the law of the Lord. 

Instead of setting this text to sound joyful or celebratory–there’s an exclamation point after “Lord” in the New Revised Standard Version of the Psalm lines–Stanford writes music that is soft and plaintive. To walk with God, to live a Godly life, is not easy and can be filled with loneliness; Stanford’s music brings the hidden implications of the text to the surface in Beati quorum via.  

Stanford is one of those composers whose music begs us to question the definition and value of originality in music. On the one hand, you can hear at times the echos of Bach or Mendelssohn–as you can in his Irish Rhapsodies or the “Irish” Symphony–but on the other hand, you can hear the ways that Stanford uses style in conjunction with texts to paint unusually nuanced portraits. Stanford’s music also shows rare refinement.