Ahead of a Wexford Opera revival of Charles Villiers Stanford's opera The Critic, along with a panel discussion exploring Stanford's work at Trinity College, Tom Mooney revisits the life and times of the Irish composer, music teacher, and conductor of the late Romantic era.
Due to the nature of things, at the end of a long life composer Charles Villiers Stanford was considered in some quarters to be past his sell-by date. So it is ironic that a century after his death and in the country of his birth one of his last works is being revived at Wexford Festival Opera.
That Stanford became an anachronism in his dotage was attributable to the shifting sands of culture in the midst of unprecedented political upheaval at home and abroad but this shouldn’t distract from his qualities as a composer.
Listen: Charles Villiers Stanford's Magnificat in C, op. 115
He was a dyed in the wool Irish Unionist with a fiery Dublin brogue whose politics was shattered by two events between 1914 and his death a decade later: The Irish War of Independence and the Great War between his adopted Great Britain and a country for whom he carried a torch because of his love for the music of Beethoven, Germany.
Stanford distracted himself from the war by adapting Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s satire, The Critic. The war was expected to last until Christmas but troops – including many of Stanford’s students and future composers - were still bogged down in the trenches when The Critic premiered in London, weeks before the Easter Rising in 1916.
Stanford, born in 1852 and a product of the same Protestant Ascendancy background as his fellow Dubliners in London, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, had carved a respectable career as an all-round musician and composer and hailed as a progenitor of an English musical Renaissance.
Though his opera was conceived in the shadow of war, Stanford worked at many removes from it.
But it was as a teacher at the Royal College of Music, celebrated for his fury of integrity and direct judgement, which left its most indelible mark on the future of English classical music: among his students were composers in the making, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ivor Gurney and Arthur Bliss, all of whom served in the war.
Entering his last decade, Stanford was out of touch both musically - his Elgar-like symphonies seemed pedestrian in the wake of the cutting edge Stravinsky’s revolutionary Rite of Spring which ruthlessly dispensed with tradition - and politically – the aftermath of The Rising left his unionist aspirations for Ireland in tatters.
Though his opera was conceived in the shadow of war, Stanford worked at many removes from it. What attracted him about his fellow Dubliner Sheridan was not his politics, radical and revolutionary, but his skill writing burlesque comedy. The play concerns Puff and a self-penned melodrama which Sheridan deployed as a means to ridicule the bloated emotions and contrived plots of the London stage in 1779, devices which a century later would serve Stanford’s grandiose tragedies and comic operas.
A slave to the past prevented Stanford from ever shedding the influence of the Great Masters, which is why he was dismissed as a trifler by Shaw and accused by others of Victorian fustiness
And yet the influence of the Great Masters, including Donizetti and Verdi, is omnipresent throughout The Critic, his eighth and penultimate opera. It was reviewed enthusiastically by critics, enchanted by the profligate melodic riches which had helped make Stanford’s reputation with earlier compositions like Irish Symphony No. 3 and Shamus O’Brien. Stanford was not radical but he was always effective.
🎭Join us on Sept 24th for Theatre within Theatre: Critics talk about 'The Critic'!🎭
— Trinity Long Room Hub (@TLRHub) August 27, 2024
Our panel of experts will delve into plays within operas, the history of metadrama, and the critic's role on and off the stage.
Don't miss this unique event as part of the Trinity Arts &… pic.twitter.com/qKAA75JIuJ
On September 24th, the Trinity Long Room Hub is hosting a special panel discussion on The Critic, this year’s Wexford Festival Opera production of Stanford’s comic opera; guest speakers include Rosetta Cucchi, Artistic Director at Wexford Festival Opera, Conor Hanratty, Stage Director for The Critic and Una Hunt, expert on Stanford and Professor of Performance at TU Dublin. The conversation will be chaired by Chris Morash, international theatre historian and Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing at Trinity College Dublin. For more infomation, go here.
