Tom Winpenny performs upon the organ of Queens' College, University of Cambridge.
Recording Information:
Recorded in Queens' College, University of Cambridge on 18-20 August 2010
Producer, Engineer and Editor: Adam Binks
Cover image: Cambridge University © foto.fritz - Fotolia.com
Photography: © Resonus Ltd
Booklet Notes:
Charles Villiers Stanford: Organ Works
For much of his career, Sir Charles Villiers
Stanford's reputation was founded on
his ability as a composer of considerable
technical and creative mastery. As a
pioneering professor of composition at the
Royal College of Music (RCM), he and his
colleague, Sir C. Hubert H. Parry (1848-1918),
were responsible for cultivating the talents of
the lion-share of British composers of note
from 1883. As the musicologist and
biographer, Jeremy Dibble, has already noted,
however, we know little about Stanford's
musical activities during his time at Cambridge
and before. Moreover, the selective information
contained within the autobiographical Pages
from an Unwritten Diary gives only partial
insight into Stanford's musical activities at Cambridge and reveals less still about the organ works he composed during this period and beyond.
By the time Stanford arrived in Cambridge in October 1870 as organ scholar at Queens' College, he had studied the organ with (Sir) Robert Prescott Stewart (1825-1894), organist of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin (1852-1894). Stanford, whose father (a successful Dublin lawyer) sang in the cathedral choir there, had been a keen observer in the organ loft at St Patrick's for Sunday Evensong, known as ‘Paddy's Opera'. According to Stanford's own testimony, Stewart was a virtuosic player
whose capacity to commit music to memory was as legendary as his prodigious ability to play the organ music of Bach accurately at a faster tempo than was commonplace. As Stanford commented: Stewart's innovative ‘treatment of Bach ... was only an intelligent anticipation of the principles of phrasing, upon which Schweitzer la[id] such stress. Stewart applied the same method of "bowing" to his organ music, that Joachim and others have laid down in practice and by precept for the violin works.'
While Stanford did write two sets of evening canticles at Queens'-the service in F major and the service in E flat major-and it is likely that both were performed in the Old Chapel, choral services having been restored there from 1854-it was as an organist and pianist,
rather than as a composer, that his reputation came initially to be established in Cambridge, possibly as a consequence of Stewart's guidance as a teacher and performer.
During these early years in Cambridge a series of circumstances conspired to initiate Stanford's meteoric rise. In 1871, while still an undergraduate, he was elected Assistant Conductor of the Cambridge University Musical Society (CUMS) to aid the valetudinarian John Larkin Hopkins (1819-1873) who was CUMS conductor and organist of Trinity College (18561873). Stanford moved to Trinity as Hopkins's assistant in 1873. Upon Hopkins's death the
same year, Stanford was appointed to both posts from 1874. As conductor of CUMS, he introduced women into the chorus and set about improving standards and modernising the repertoire. As organist at Trinity, he continued the formidable recital series begun by Hopkins in 1872 as a showcase for the new German-system organ installed by William Hill & Son the same year. Hopkins's innovative specification for four manuals and pedals included an independent pedal division that comprised a principal chorus up to 4', 16' and 8' reeds and a three-rank Mixture; while unusual in the nineteenth-century, such a stop-list would not be out
of place on an English cathedral organ in
the twenty-first century. Not only was it a
suitable instrument for playing Bach, it was
sufficiently well-designed to accommodate
Stanford's introduction of a broad repertoire of works specifically written for the organ
from 1874 alongside the staple diet of
orchestral transcriptions.
It is likely that Stanford's earliest extant
work for organ, the Prelude and Fugue in
E minor, was composed during his first year
as organist at Trinity. Alan Gray is thought
to have given the premiere the same year.
Gray had just started as an undergraduate
at Trinity: he assisted the able organist and
fellow, Gerard Cobb who took charge of
the music during Stanford's two, six-month
sabbaticals to Leipzig and Berlin during
1874 and 1875. In January 1876, the Prelude
was published in the Organist's Quarterly of
Original Compositions; from 1887, it was
taken on by Novello. The Prelude, a Pastorale
based on a sonorous eight-bar melody set
against a semi-quaver, quasi-Alberti
movement in the left hand, is redolent of
the ‘Allegro assai' in Alexandre Guilmant's
Organ Sonata No. 1 also published in 1874.
Both melody and accompaniment are then
inverted before reappearing in E major. The
Fugue subject is based on the melody in the
Prelude; like the Prelude, it also begins in
E minor and ends when the subject reappears,
augmented, after a series of episodes and
interludes, in E major.
In 1881, the publication of the first complete
set of the organ works of J. S. Bach in England,
edited by (Sir) Frederick Bridge (professor
of organ at the National Training School of
Music) and James Higgs, rescued them from
relative obscurity in England. When the
NTSM closed in 1882, Bridge transferred to
the RCM where he and Stanford became
colleagues.
Given these developments and what we
know of Stanford's early musical training
in Dublin, it is hardly surprising that both
movements of his Fantasia and Toccata in
D minor, Op. 57 pay homage to Bach, albeit
through Victorian eyes. It represents his
first large-scale, mature work for organ:
composed in July 1894, it is dedicated to
his colleague, Sir Walter Parratt. Both men
had known each other at least since the
1870s when Stanford had invited him on
several occasions to give organ recitals at
Trinity. Since 1883, they had been colleagues
at the RCM. Stanford's dedication marked
the culmination of a series of honours
received by Parratt during the 1890s. In
addition to being an innovative chief
professor of organ at the RCM, Parratt had
been appointed Organist at St George's
Chapel, Windsor Castle in 1882. By 1894,
he had been knighted (1892), made Master
of the Queen's Music in 1893-a position
he retained during the two subsequent
reigns of Edward VII and George V-and
awarded the Oxford degree of Doctor of
Music honoris causa.
The Fantasia is modelled on Bach's Fantasia
in G minor BWV 542: the five contrasting
sections in Stanford's work correspond
directly to the five sections in Bach's ‘Fantasia'.
Stanford's liberal employment of diminished
sevenths echoes the Bach as does the
chromatic link-passage between the final,
contrasting section of the work and its
denouement. Stanford, however, juxtaposes
the fantasia sections in common time with
the contrasting, softer sections in compound
six-eight time which suggest the influence of
the ‘Andante sostenuto' from Mendelssohn's
organ Sonata No. 6 in D minor (1845). In
Mendelssohn's Sonata, the fantasia develops
out of the opening chorale (Vater unser im
himmelreich), and is contrasted with a
twelve-eight section, at the same speed
(crotchet = 63) as the softer sections in
Stanford's ‘Fantasia'.
The Toccata falls into five sections and a
coda: Allegro (bb. 1-149), Animato (bb. 149169),
piu lento e maestoso (bb. 169-176),
Allegro assai (bb. 177-193), Maestoso (bb.
194-203) and coda (bb. 204-215). The
quasi-fugal pedal opening (bb. 1-8), which
reappears in extended form at bb. 32-42,
gives way to a virtuosic semi-quaver passage
in the manuals that is redolent of the Fugue in C minor from the Bach's Well-Tempered
Clavier Book 1 (BWV 847). Towards the end
of the long first section, the syncopated
cross-play between the pedal and manuals,
similar to those found in the final ‘Allegro
molto' section of the first movement of
Mendelssohn's Sonata No. 6, leads into a
semi-quaver passage in octaves shared
between both hands and feet before the
short, master (Animato) re-statement of the
original manual semi-quaver passage. This
section (bb. 149-169), which ends with a
series of contrary-motion scales, broken
chords and diminished sevenths over a
chromatic pedal line, reflects Mendelssohn's
use of broken chords and diminished
sevenths in the ‘Allegro molto' section of
Sonata No. 6. A short link passage (piu lento
e maestoso) in the Toccata' appears to
echo the first contrasting section of Bach's
Fantasia in G minor, before returning to
the semi-quaver material of the previous
section. The coda in Stanford's ‘Toccata',
which is in minims, appears to reflect
Mendelssohn's re-statement of the chorale
melody in the final bars of Sonata No. 6.
The Prelude (in form of a Chaconne), Op.
88, No. 2 from Six Preludes for Organ was
written in 1903 and published initially in
The Vocalist (1903-5), with Breitkopf and
Härtel c.1905 and by Stainer and Bell in
1913. This is one of a number of pieces
written by Stanford to ‘satisfy the demands
of publishers rather than his artistic
aspirations' (Dibble, 383); however, it was
a mutually beneficial arrangement as
Stanford needed the income from royalties.
Stanford takes the eight-bar opening theme,
which first appears in the manuals, and
forms a ground bass in the pedals. He then
variously sets the theme against quaver,
triplet, syncopated and semi-quaver counter-
themes until it re-appears successively in the
right-hand and then the left. A rich harmonic
tapestry of dominant and diminished seventh
chords, by now typical of Stanford's writing,
alongside coquettish rhythmic devices conspire
to heighten tension towards the interlude
into the final section, which resolves from
E minor to E major via a German sixth. The
theme, in the right hand, on full Great, is set
against an interplay of quaver arpeggios
shared between the left hand and pedals.
The Postlude in D minor from Six Short
Preludes and Postludes Set 2, Op. 105 No. 6,
was composed in February 1908 and
published the same year. Along with the
publication of Six Short Preludes and
Postludes Set 1, Op. 101 (published in 1907),
and the Fantasia and Fugue in D minor, Op.
103, it represents Stanford's first collaboration
with the new publishing house, begun in
1907, Stainer and Bell. By happy coincidence,
Stanford's friend and colleague, the Irish
baritone, Harry Plunket Green (1865-1936),
was one of two members of the music
selection committee at Stainer and Bell,
where a concentration on areas such as
small-scale organ and church music
conspired to provide Stanford with the
perfect opportunity to publish his work.
The Postlude in D minor begins with a
grand statement of the ten-bar chordal
theme. The second theme, which is modal
in character, begins in the pedals in A major
but soon makes its way back to D minor and
a return to the opening material through a
series of chromatic shifts. The lyrical middle
section, in D major, develops the theme of
the second section that leads into a link-
passage incorporating a re-working of the
initial statement in the major over a
dominant pedal. This, in turn, modulates
back to D minor and the appearance of
a heavily-embellished and extended
recapitulation of first section.
The Canzona from Te Deum Laudamus,
Fantasia and Canzona, Op. 116, was
composed in c. 1909 and published by
G. Schirmer, New York, and Winthrop
Rogers in London the following year.
Originally sixteenth- and seventeenth-
century in origin, the term Canzona had
developed by the nineteenth century to
describe a song or lyrical instrumental
piece. From the late-nineteenth century
onwards the term was applied to a
movement from a large-scale work for
organ. Stanford's Canzona is based on a
lyrical melody in D minor. The use of
ornaments in the opening section and the
double-dotting in the second section suggest
a passing nod to a bygone age, one with
which he would have been familiar from
his composition teaching at the RCM.
The opening theme (Andante espressivo),
which appears after a short introduction in
octaves, is stated on a soft Swell reed before
fragments are reworked in the major as
the piece transforms into a more chromatic
texture. The dotted rhythm in the Piu
animato section, which begins in the pedals,
introduces a new, march-like theme that
finally leads into a recapitulation of the
original melody, which is developed over a
semi-quaver pattern before the reintroduction
of fragments of the opening theme in D
major, which softens in dynamic to a short coda.
In Modo Dorico, from Op. 132 No. 1,
originally composed in 1912 as part of the
Six Characteristic Pieces (1. In Modo Dorico,
2. Romance, 3. Study, 4. Roundel, 5. Romance
& 6. Toccata) for piano, was published in
1913 by Stainer and Bell. The set is dedicated
to the Polish pianist, and pupil of Liszt,
Moriz Rosenthal (1862-1946), who visited
England in 1895. Material from In Modo
Dorico was extensively reworked as the
Prelude to Stanford's final opera, The
Travelling Companion (1916), published
in 1917 by the Carnegie Trust, and for
which the English poet, Sir Henry Newbolt
(1862-1938) supplied the libretto. The Six
Characteristic Pieces were arranged for
organ by Stanford himself at the request
of Stainer and Bell. Stanford's marking,
Adagio molto e solenne, sets the scene and
gives the impression of a solemn church
procession. As its title suggests, In Modo
Dorico is based on the first of the church
modes. The opening phrase-a harmonized
scale beginning on D-establishes the
Dorian flavour from the start. The initial
sections are liberally peppered with
sharpened sixths (B naturals); indeed, the
first flattened sixth (B flat) does not appear
until b. 24. The modal effect is emphasized
further still by the parallel movement of
the texture up until the coda. Thereafter
the modal sonority gives way to diatonicism
and a series of roulades in F major ending
in a perfect cadence in D and a tierce de
Picardy in the final chord.
Epithalamium from Six Occasional Preludes
(1. At Christmas-tide, 2. Occasional, 3. At
Easter-tide, 4. Requiem, 5. Epithalamium
& 6. At Eventide). Composed in 1921 and
published posthumously by Stainer and
Bell in 1930, they provide the organist with
a piece for a number of church services. ‘At
Christmas-tide' is based on the theme of
‘Adeste fidelis', while ‘At Easter-tide' is
based on a fragment of the tune ‘Easter
Hymn' from the Lyra Davidica (1708).
The word ‘Epithalamium'-literally ‘upon'
('epi') the ‘nuptial chamber' ('thalamos')-
refers to a form of poem written to a wife
on her way to the marriage bed. Set to
music, it is thought to have been a song
of praise to bride and bridegroom and sung
at the entrance to the marital chamber (or
to rouse the couple from sleep the following
morning), and interposed, from time to time,
by a hymn of praise to the Greek god of
marriage ceremonies, Hymenaios.
That Stanford's Epithalamium echoes the
beginning of Bach's setting of Jesu joy of
man's desiring would not have been lost on
church congregations of the 1930s. Set in
compound time (nine-eight) and marked
Allegro con brio, the lyrical dance-like quaver
opening passage, broadly in three beats in
a bar, reflects the joy of bride and groom
on their wedding day. The opening quaver
passage in the manuals is picked up in the
following phrase by the pedals and requires
a youthful agility from the player. Thereafter
Stanford paints a contrapuntal and harmonic
landscape where German sixths, enharmonic
shifts and interrupted cadences all conspire
to produce a rich texture. The final section
is characterised by a diminuendo, and a
series of sighing phrases, as the bride and
bridegroom finally reach their destination,
appropriately illustrated by a pianissimo
feminine cadence.
By the Seashore, Op. 194, No. 1 is the first
of Three Idylls (1. By the Seashore, 2. In the
Country & 3. The Angelus), composed in
1922. Published posthumously in 1930 by
Stainer and Bell, they were intended for
the secular market and the Town Hall organ
recital.
Constructed in simple A-B-A form, By the
Seashore opens with a dotted motif that
reappears throughout the piece. The
pianistic semi-quaver theme, marked up
to full Swell to depict crashing waves,
calms to a reflective second section in D
flat major via an interrupted cadence. The
material that follows is redolent of
Stanford's own setting of Psalm 122, Op.
113 (I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills),
also in D flat, and the smooth melody,
which moves in crotchets and by step in
the manuals, and is accompanied by a quaver figure in the pedals, seems to
suggest that the storm has died away. A
return to C major via one of Stanford's
favourite devices, a German sixth, and
the semi-quaver material of the first
section, leads into the final section, which,
although altered this time, and without
Swell reeds, subsides to a Coda where
a written-out rallentando, softens to a
perfect cadence.
The Three Preludes and Fugues, Op. 193,
were composed in December, 1922 and
published the following year by Novello.
Both the Fugue in C minor and the Fugue
in B minor were arranged for piano and
published respectively in 1922 and 1923. And
yet it is the Prelude in C minor, with its lyrical
compound quaver arpeggio movement, that
seems the most pianistic of the set. All three
preludes are well constructed: none is longer
than three pages and two out of three end
quietly, indicating that it was Stanford's
intention that both Prelude and Fugue
should be played together. It also suggests
that they were composed on demand and
to a publisher's formula. The preludes are
similar in scale to the preludes and postludes
Opp. 101 and 105.
The Prelude in C major (No. 1) begins with
a stately opening in the tonic but otherwise,
conforms to no particular structure; rather,
it continues through a series of chromatic
sequences, suspension and resolution,
across three manuals and pedals to a quiet
ending. The Fugue in C major includes such
an impressive array of technical devices-
a tonal answer, invertible counterpoint,
stretto, diminution and a redundant entry
even gives the impression that there are
five parts-one could be forgiven for
thinking that this was a composition
exercise had it not been crafted by an
experienced technician at the height of
his powers. The Prelude in C minor (No. 2)
is in nine-eight and the initial four-note
phrase in dotted crotchets in the left hand
(C, A, B, C) is developed throughout the
movement. The Fugue in C minor (marked
Molto Allegro, alla Toccata), actually a
virtuosic, three-part fughetta-there are no
complete entries of the Fugue subject
after the exposition-hence it was easily
transferred to the piano. The Prelude from
the final set in the group, the Prelude and
Fugue in B minor (No. 3), is through-
composed in six-four time. Marked Lento
e solenne, the opening theme is developed
through a series of dissonances that resolve
finally at the cadence and only then on the
final chord. It is the only Prelude in the set
that ends loudly. Like the Fugue in C minor,
the Fugue in B minor is also a fughetta.
Marked ‘Fuga Cromatica' the exposition
leads into a semi-quaver episode via a short
interlude where the angular subject is restated
at various pitches before a final
fantasia and coda. As in the Prelude, this
movement is characterized by dissonance
as Stanford appears to take his listener on
a safari through every chromatic complexion
by degrees, the resolution only arriving on
the final chord.
Intermezzo (founded upon an Irish air),
Op. 189 No. 4, from Four Intermezzi were
composed c. 1923 and published the same
year by Novello. Possibly the last pieces for
organ composed by Stanford, the inclusion
of Intermezzo No. 4, founded on the
Londonderry Air, may seem innocuous
enough and a prelude based on such a popular
melody may have simply been destined for
high numbers of sales as it could equally have
been performed in town hall and church
alike; however, it seems there may be more
to it than that. Stanford was a pugnacious
opponent of Home Rule in Ireland. He had
grown up in a family that was part of the
Protestant metropolitan Dublin Establishment.
He believed that Ireland had benefited from
being part of the Union with Britain and the
civilizing influence brought by that relationship.
Having emigrated to England at the age of 18
never to return to Ireland, and the fact that
‘he ardently supported political and religious
held by a minority of the Irish population',
suggests that he was, as Paul Rodmell puts
it, ‘in love with the Ireland of his dreams
rather than the Ireland of his experience'
(Rodmell, 397f.) To have set a melody with
such close northern Irish associations a mere
six years after the Easter uprising in Dublin
suggests that his views had not mellowed
with age; equally, it may simply be that this
Intermezzo represents a nostalgic look back
to his homeland as he felt his life drawing to
its close. The nineteenth-century instrumental
intermezzo was a lyrical and melodic character
piece. Despite having been written at the
end of his life, the Intermezzo No. 4 is clearly
a retrospectivenpiece both in terms of its
genre and its style. While its harmonic
language was undoubtedly beginning to
sound outdated by 1923, it is simple and
well-crafted and demonstrates, albeit on
a small canvas, Stanford's considerable
technical proficiency.
© 2011 G.W.E. Brightwell
With thanks to the President and Fellows of Queens' College, Cambridge, Madeleine Lovell, Dr Jonathan Holmes and Richard Barnes of Cathedral Music.
