Stanford matriculated at Queens’ in October 1870. From the beginning he felt at home since many of his old Dublin friends were students at the same university. As one of Cambridge's first organ scholars he applied himself with customary vigour to his duties in chapel (a building which now houses the Library). Special services and performances of sacred music soon began to attract attention across the university. The young Irishman was not only a fine organist but a notable choir-trainer. The Cambridge University Musical Society (CUMS) was also quickly aware of his presence. Stanford was elected a member of the society at a meeting of 25 October with his debut as a pianist occurring shortly afterwards on 30 November. This performance, warmly applauded by the audience, was to signal his rapid rise to prominence within the hierarchy of Cambridge music.

During his first term at the University there was little opportunity for composition, but he did find time to complete a setting of Thomas Campbell's ‘To the evening star’ (dated 18 December 1870) whose harmonic world seems haunted by Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben. He also finished a Pater Noster for Stewart and the Dublin University Choral Society which was performed on 19 December. The Christmas vacation was spent largely socialising among old friends. He joined a populous gathering at Adare Manor, Lord Dunraven's country seat in Co. Limerick and later visited the Graves family at Parknasilla where he took part as pianist and composer in a satirical sketch on Darwinism concocted by Alfred, Charles and Arnold.

Back at Cambridge in early 1871, Stanford continued to make his mark as the most promising musician the university had seen in decades. The CUMS programmes for the year show that he was already dominating events. In March he appeared as pianist in Beethoven's Piano Trio Op. 3 No. 1 and in June he was the soloist in a concerto by Weber. In fact Stanford's speedy rise to fame occurred at an opportune moment in the history of the society. It so happened that the health of the society's conductor, John Larkin Hopkins, had begun to fail. In February 1870 he had tendered his resignation to CUMS with the promise that George Garrett, the organist of St John’s, would take over his responsibilities. Hopkins’ resignation was rejected by the CUMS committee, but it still left the society with an uncertain future.

Stanford's career as a conductor had enjoyed a modest revival with his appointment in 1906 as conductor of the Sunday Concert Society, but owing to considerable financial losses on the concerts, the Society decided to give up its contract with the LSO and hand the entire operation over to Henry Wood and the Queen's Hall Orchestra. Visits to provinces were now a rarer event. Apart from invitations to conduct at the Three Choirs Festival, he made one visit to Birmingham in March 1908 and another to Liverpool in March 1909 to conduct his ‘Irish’ Symphony. The following year he was invited to conduct the Ode to Discord at the rapidly expanding Brighton Festival and, as a guest of the Dover Musical Festival, he was asked to direct a revival of The Battle of the Baltic. However, with more established works, Stanford was increasingly willing to attend performances of his music rather than take the baton. He was, for example, happy to stand by while Hamish MacCunn (as part of the Beecham Opera Season) undertook the direction of Shamus at His Majesty's Theatre in May 1910, and George Bennett (organist of Lincoln Cathedral) conducted the Stabat Mater at the Lincoln Festival in June. He was also ready to fulfil other roles, whether in the capacity of accompanist to Plunket Greene (who remained the foremost interpreter of his Irish song cycles and folk-song arrangements), or as President of the Cheltenham Choral Society and the Rodewald Concert Society in Liverpool.

Henry Wood continued to promote his music; his wife Olga Mikhailov sang two of Stanford's songs from The Triumphs of Love – ‘I think that we were children’ and ‘O flames of passion’ – specially orchestrated for her to sing at a Promenade Concert on 23 October 1909. It was her last public appearance. In great pain she managed stoically to perform with her usual professional deportment, but soon after she was removed to a nursing home, underwent an operation, but died on 20 December. Landon Ronald, who had made his name as an assistant conductor with the LSO, and would soon establish his reputation with the New Symphony Orchestra, conducted Stanford's First Irish Rhapsody in Amsterdam and Rome to great acclaim and revived the Sixth Symphony at Queen's Hall on 2 December 1909.

On 16 February 1882 Stanford received an official letter from the Prince of Wales inviting him to a meeting at St James's Palace on 28 February in order to discuss the establishment of a new college of music to replace the National Training School. The very issue of a new Royal College of Music had been the subject of debate for some time, for which there were delicate political matters to resolve. The Royal Academy of Music had once been the target of Henry Cole's aspirations for a new, enlarged national conservatory of music; but after the plan was rejected by Sterndale Bennett, who wanted the RAM to remain independent, Cole decided to push ahead with his own plans for a National Training School of Music with royal support.1 The project of the NTSM, opened in 1876 under the direction of Arthur Sullivan, was brought to a close under the leadership of John Stainer in 1882. Though moderately successful in its aims, the NTSM had never been more than a preliminary foundation for a more socially progressive institution initially conceived by the Prince Consort after the Great Exhibition in 1851.

Momentum for the new college began to gather during 1881, and in 1882 discussion of its constitution, accommodation and concomitant finance, with George Grove at the helm, was ubiquitous in the musical press. Stanford, anxious to be included in the new venture – he had been too young and inexperienced for the NTSM – accepted the Prince of Wales's invitation to attend the first meeting at St James's Palace in February 1882 with alacrity. Privately he expressed his views on the matter with Hudson, and there was even the suggestion that, if London did not want the new conservatoire, then it might be situated in Cambridge:

Ill-health cut short Stanford's final stay in Berlin. ‘I am happily nearly all right again now,’ he wrote to Joachim, ‘and looking forward with tremendous excitement to the 8th.’ The Lent Term of 1877 was, as usual, a busy one. Stanford returned to take up his more permanent duties with the chapel choir at Trinity, though it was not until Lady Day (25 March) that he was officially confirmed in his position as Chapel Organist. Conditions for the post included a stipend of £250 together with rooms and Commons, though it was still for the Choir Committee to draw up a new set of conditions. Though these proved to have some advantages, notably sanction to be continuously absent from college during all weeks in the year when there was no choral service, they were also a source of irritation, particularly since the Precentor still retained the responsibility for the selection of music.

The ‘Wednesday Pops’ proceeded with increased vigour. Of the six scheduled concerts in February and March, Stanford appeared in the first four as pianist with members of the ‘Stanford Quartet’, as a duettist with Fuller Maitland in Schumann's Bilder aus Osten Op. 66 (21 February) and in his own ‘Andante and Scherzo from a Serenade’ (7 March) which were most probably two movements of his later Serenade Op. 18 for orchestra. February also saw the completion of Three Ditties of the Olden Time which consisted of two settings of Sir John Suckling's well-known lyrics (‘Out upon it’ and ‘Why so pale and wan’) and one by Herrick (‘To carnations’); they were published by Stanley Lucas.

The high point of the term for CUMS was of course the choral and orchestral concert of 8 March given at the Guildhall in aid of Addenbrooke's Hospital. After a morning rehearsal of the fifty-piece, London-based orchestra (an expenditure for the Society of £217/-/10d) and chorus of 150, Joachim received his degree in the afternoon. The concert in the evening proved to be a major social occasion attracting the likes of Lord Leighton, Robert Browning, George Lewes, Edward Dannreuther, August Manns, Manuel Garcia, Ebenezer Prout and the usual fraternity of critics: Bennett, Grüneisen, Hueffer and Davison. A concert in Manchester prevented Hallé from attending, and the up-and-coming Parry was in Cannes, detained by the necessity of his wife's convalescence.

Even before tendering his resignation to Trinity College, Stanford had already been thinking about moving from Harvey Road. Commitments to the Bach Choir, the RCM, the Opera Class and proximity to the expanding musical life of Britain's capital made the acquisition of a house in London all the more imperative. A house at 55 Holland Street in Kensington (close to High Street, Kensington) was found which suited his needs perfectly. It had more room than his Cambridge dwelling, it was located in a desirable if expensive area and it was within easy reach of the College and the city centre. It was not possible, however, to move into Holland Street until February, so he and his family spent most of January at St Leonard’s, while he found temporary lodgings with Morton Lathom, a Bach Choir colleague, in Norfolk Street, Park Lane. Rehearsals for Becket were also gathering momentum and Stanford was keen to coach the singers and chorus, as he explained to Bram Stoker:

Stanford was, however, forced to forego the premiere of Becket at the Lyceum Theatre on 6 February 1893 owing to an obligation he had made to review the first performance of Verdi's Falstaff for The Daily Graphic and the Fortnightly Review. The opera was to be premiered on 9 February 1893 at La Scala, Milan, and the Stanfords were to be guests of the librettist, Arrigo Boïto, whom they had befriended during a stay with Piatti at Cadenabbia in 1889.

On 7 October 1918, a month before Armistice, the death of Parry was announced. For Stanford the news came as a terrible shock. Though they had been on better terms since their row in early 1917, both men undoubtedly still felt bruised by their earlier differences. Parry's death unfortunately prevented Stanford from delivering his masterly Magnificat in B flat Op. 164 for a cappella double choir (finished in September 1918) to his old friend, which only added to the composer's state of grief. This fine, and often-performed work (though a challenge to the best of choirs), in many ways paid tribute to Parry's stature as a choral composer. The double-choir scoring acknowledges the close link between Blest Pair of Sirens and the two men, and, at the same time, its clear reference to Bach's effusive eight-part ‘Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied’ (which Stanford conducted numerous times) and his own Magnificat (to which Parry had also expressed his open reverence in his choral Magnificat of 1897) honoured Parry's devotion to Bach both in his music and his study of the composer of 1909. Stanford's remarkable setting is, like much of his service music and anthems, symphonic in scope, but here the treatment of the text is much more expansive and not confined by the usual constraints of the Anglican liturgy. One is immediately aware of this in the generous and rhythmically dynamic tripartite opening section and in the four contrasting movements that follow in E flat (‘Qui a fecit mihi magna’), C minor (‘Fecit potentiam’), and D flat (‘Esurientes implevit buonis’) before B flat is restored with the final verse of text (‘Suscepit Israel’) in a splendid gathering of momentum from an initial pastoral mood to a buoyant, climactic ‘alla breve’. And to reinforce this return to the tonic, Stanford recalls the opening material in a more truncated form, using the text of the doxology. The concluding ‘Amen’, furthermore, is one of the composer's most thrilling in its sudden epigrammatic divergence to G flat directly before the spacious final cadence.

With the help of his friends, such as M. R. James, Parratt and Arthur Balfour, Stanford was able to press home his desire to see Parry buried in St Paul's Cathedral and to hear his own anthem, ‘I heard a voice from heaven’, sung at the memorial service on 16 October.

At the end of each entry an abbreviated reference to the location of the autograph manuscript (Aut.) has been included (see list of abbreviations). ‘Unperformed’ and ‘unpublished’ both refer to the composer's lifetime.

Choral Works

Published only in vocal score except where ‘full score’ is indicated. Unless otherwise indicated, a normal orchestra is used. Opus numbers, dedications, dates of completion (provided by the composer),and dates of first performances are given together with any revisions. Unless otherwise stated, first performances were conducted by the composer.

Christmas 1895 was spent in the Palast Hotel in Berlin where Stanford was later joined by Borwick and Plunket Greene. The concert at the Singakademie on 30 December, organised in collaboration with Wolff, was intended to be a major advertisement for British music in the German capital and Stanford, who was to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, hoped very much that, with assistance from the British Embassy, the Kaiser and other governmental dignitaries would attend. The audience, which included many eminent German musicians, was, according to the reviews, enthusiastic. Early in the new year he had the chance to meet Brahms for what proved to be the last time. The two men had been in contact in 1895 when Stanford had sent Brahms a copy of his Irish Songs and Ballads to Vienna in exchange for some portrait photographs Brahms had promised him:

In Berlin Stanford enjoyed the company of Joachim and other prominent musicians such as Eugene d’Albert who played both of Brahms's piano concertos under Brahms's direction (10 January) – it was the last time he appeared before the public as a conductor. Afterwards Joachim gave a dinner party in his honour to which Stanford, Hausmann and Herzogenberg were invited; it was a convivial affair which gave rise to the famous vignette regarding Brahms's personal loathing of eulogy:

‘We had a glorious time in Berlin and that last supper was a delightful end,’ he wrote to Joachim after he had arrived back in London.

The outbreak of war on 4 August 1914 and the publication of Stanford's autobiography, Pages from an Unwritten Diary, marked an important watershed in his life. The autobiography in many ways tacitly acknowledged that his career and position as one of Britain's foremost composers now no longer existed. Nevertheless, one of the book's many purposes was to record for posterity the author's role in the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ at a time when, Stanford sensed, Britain's new musical confidence in the music of Elgar, Delius, Grainger and Vaughan Williams appeared to turn its back on its late nineteenth-century heritage, a heritage Stanford was at pains to point out, enjoyed the pedigree of his communion with the continental giants. Pages from an Unwritten Diary also summarised most of Stanford's perennial campaigns and protests – his case for English church music, a national opera, a proper ethic for music publishing and the need for a proper musical infrastructure through state subvention – but the book also devoted many pages to his Irish background, the aim of which was not only to indulge in nostalgia, but to lay emphasis on a ‘golden age’ of Anglo-Irishmen who had enriched the British Empire in all walks of professional life. Stanford wanted to be part of this ‘brilliant’ generation whose power and influence he knew was about to disappear.

The action of the German Army and the Kaiser was a source of disbelief and exasperation to Stanford. To him, Germany had become artistically decadent, a predicament he blamed on unification in 1870 and the centralising of power in Berlin:

Debate about reform of the Professorship of Music had taken place ten years earlier, in 1877, when a report of the Board of Musical Studies ‘considered it would be extremely beneficial if the Professor should reside for a period of (or periods equivalent to) not less than one term in each academic year, and thus take a more continuous and systematic part in the musical teaching of the University.’ It was thus recognised that an increase in the annual stipend would be necessary, ‘the present stipend being wholly insufficient to compensate a first rate musician, not already located in Cambridge, for the loss of professional income which such residence would involve.’ Yet, within a fortnight of Macfarren's death, recommendations were made to Senate that the fundamental conditions of the Professorship in Music would remain unchanged, even though it was evident from the Cambridge Reporter that the present position was unsatisfactory. Senate was advised, however, that it was an unfavourable time to place increased financial demands on the University chest, and so the post was advertised with the usual exemption from residence and no increase in the present stipend. Four candidates were short listed: Dr George Garrett (organist of St John's College), Edwin. M. Lott (organist of St Sepulchre's Church), Ebenezer Prout (Guildhall School of Music) and Stanford. From the panel of nine electors, who were all present, all votes were given for Stanford who was duly elected on 7 December 1887. The declaration of office and admission to the post were effected in the presence of the Vice-Chancellor and Registrar the following day. As Professor of Music, Stanford wished to be admitted as soon as possible to the degree of Doctor of Music. At Senate it was agreed as a matter of formality that the usual examinations and exercises for musical degrees be waived, but it was nevertheless proposed that Stanford should be admitted first to the Bachelor of Music and then to the degree of ‘Doctor Designate’. This course of action was, however, withdrawn at Stanford's request, and instead he was admitted as Doctor of Music honoris causa on 8 November 1888.

The beginning of January 1888 was marred by the sad news of the death of Marian Jenkinson, Jennie Stanford's youngest sister (the fifth daughter of Champion Wetton). In 1887 she had married Francis Jenkinson but the union only lasted a mere four months.