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Prompted by the latest of Christopher Howell’s ‘Stanfordian Thoughts’ (as usual fascinating in its exploration of the byways of Stanford’s career), I had one of my own! Was he not perhaps the most complete musician Britain has ever produced? His worth as a composer is gradually being reassessed through recordings if not live performances and his stature is now surely unarguable – not a giant such as Elgar or Vaughan Williams perhaps, but still a composer of the first rank. His output was prodigious with his opus numbers reaching 194 and there are a good many works in addition including at least three operas, two symphonies and three concertos, but beyond that he was teacher, conductor, performer, administrator – and, if not in the Berlioz class, his memoirs are nonetheless an entertaining read too. A truly remarkable man - and still, so far as live performance is concerned (except perhaps in cathedrals), something of a prophet without honour and all that!

Thanks, Nick, though, as you’d expect, I don’t entirely agree! That Stanford was not in the same league as Elgar is unarguable and I made that point myself; perhaps ‘of the first rank’ was an ill-chosen phrase and he falls within Richard Strauss’s self-proclaimed category: ‘I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer’! I agree that quantity of works is no measure of quality, indeed suggests that some will be of lesser quality, but there are many fine works and I’d argue that he was much more than a ‘minor figure’.

As for his animosity towards Elgar, that was surely very much a two-way thing. Stanford, as the senior composer, was very supportive of Elgar, conducting his music and using his influence to get him an honorary doctorate at Cambridge as well as membership of the Atheneum. Things went awry when Elgar was appointed Peyton Professor of Music at Birmingham: Stanford wrote a letter (which doesn’t seem to have survived) which upset the unusually sensitive Elgar and he responded with remarks in his inaugural lecture that deeply (and understandably) wounded Stanford. Both appear to have been difficult men and Elgar at least as much blame for the falling-out. Perhaps Christopher Howell might have some ‘Thoughts’ on the issue!

Perhaps the problem lies in the idea that composers can be ranked like tennis players, leading us to zany lists by Classic FM and the like that would rank Florence Price above these and most others.
A very few composers, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, seem universally accepted as of the first rank. Looked at this way, neither Stanford nor Elgar was in the first rank, so in order to differentiate between them (and the likes of Brahms, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and numerous others) we need to invent a second rank, a third rank, a fourth rank, with maybe a second plus, a first minus, all very amusing to work out and maybe for some a more entertaining pastime than listening to the music.
And then, fist/second rank in what? If we allow that Elgar wrote better symphonies than Stanford, what about partsongs or motets? Can you find a partsong by Elgar that stops time like Stanford's Blue Bird or The Haven, or a motet like Justorum Animae? This brings us to another form of ranking, one that assumes a symphony to be of itself a higher form of endeavour than a partsong or a motet. I'm not sure this is so. Nor is it only a matter of small forms versus larger ones. Judge Stanford on his string quartets and you find a higher-ranking (here we go again) master than with the symphonies.
Another issue is transportability. Try as people will, Elgar has limited appeal even in Nordic countries and virtually none in Latin ones. And you cannot say, as you once could, that this is because they haven't heard the music. As for Stanford, they haven't had much chance recently. In his own day, his music travelled more readily than Elgar's, but times and conditions have changed, I'm not saying this could be repeated today

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