After enjoying his heyday in the 1880s and 1890s, Stanford’s reputation undoubtedly underwent a process of eclipse when Elgar, whom he had done much to encourage (a fact often overlooked), broke onto the national scene with Caractacus, the Enigma Variations, the Sea Pictures, The Dream of Gerontius and the Pomp and Circumstance marches (all works, incidentally, Stanford greatly admired). We know, too, from his correspondence, particularly with Hans Richter, that he felt the ensuing neglect keenly. However, it is also evident from Stanford’s career that he was a man of extraordinary resilience. Although he undoubtedly revelled in the successes of The Revenge at Leeds (1886), his ‘Irish’ Symphony (1887) under Richter, a complete concert of his music in the Berlin Gesangverein (1889) and his Irish comedy opera, Shamus O’Brien (1896), not to mention the recognition he gained as a member of the Beethovenhaus, the Berlin Akademie der Künste and the cosmopolitan acquaintances he cemented with figures such as Bruch, Brahms, Dvořák, Tchaikovsky, Boïto, Verdi, Saint-Saëns, Rachmaninov and Glazounov, he suffered many disappointments. These can be measured by Trinity College, Cambridge’s failure to give him a fellowship (an unworthy snub), his dashed hopes of receiving an honorary degree from Yale in 1915 (made impossible by the war), and, through illness and even danger to life (by way of the Irish Civil War), his incapacity to receive an honorary degree from Trinity College, Dublin, in 1923, a tribute (if somewhat tardy) from the city of his birth which must have hurt him deeply.

Yet, in purely creative terms, Stanford’s true sense of resilience and self-belief is perhaps best gauged by his unquenchable passion for opera. Engendered by his experiences as a boy and teenager in Dublin during the 1850s and ‘60s, when the Royal Italian, Italian Opera and Pyne Harrison Company performed during their tours at the Irish capital’s Theatre Royal, Stanford’s aspirations developed with a desire to be, first and foremost, a successful operatic composer. This began quite auspiciously with his first work, The Veiled Prophet, in Hanover in 1881, Savonarola in Hamburg in 1884 and The Canterbury Pilgrims in London with Carl Rosa in 1885. The fiasco of Savonarola in London under Richter, and its critical savaging by the press, might easily have dissuaded him from attempting other works for the stage in the future, a reaction which might, moreover, have been compounded by the failure to see his Italian verismo opera, Lorenza (1893), performed (as he had hoped, at La Scala) in spite of the distinction he might have accrued by way of the work’s prestigious librettists, Ghislanzoni and Fontana.

The Critic received a highly enthusiastic reception at Wexford (photo: Patricio Cassinoni)

Although Stanford would have been reassured by the triumph of Shamus and a degree of success with Much Ado About Nothing (where he had an excellent librettist in Julian Sturgis) at Covent Garden and in Leipzig (1901), his hopes of seeing the formation of a national opera house in London where opera would be sung in English ultimately evaporated. Optimism, initially instilled by Richard D’Oyly Carte’s English Opera House in the early 1890s and the long run of Sullivan’s one grand opera, Ivanhoe, came to nothing, as did attempts to secure financial municipal support from the newly inaugurated London County Council in 1898 or even from a debate in the House of Commons. Nevertheless, Stanford was not easily deterred. His annual efforts to promote opera in the vernacular through the Opera Class at the Royal College of Music, of which he was the sole pioneer, became part of the London musical calendar, and he continued to write about the subject until shortly before his death in 1924.

The highly enthusiastic reception of his penultimate opera, The Critic or An Opera Rehearsed, at Wexford recently, unperformed professionally since 1916 (when it was first given at the Shaftesbury Theatre), is ample testimony to Stanford’s creative stamina and fortitude, his continued love of the theatre, and, perhaps most significantly, the fact that he had by no means lost his spark of fecundity and originality in the last decade of his life. Distinct from his earlier operas, which explore a range of models from Mozart, grand opera, comedy, verismo and (in Lorenza and Much Ado through-composed symphony), this brilliantly conceived canvas based on Sheridan’s satire, part play, part opera, part burlesque, is unique in its combination of actors and singers and its romantic mélange of sixteenth, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century style forms. Indeed, of all Stanford’s operas, it is the hardest to visualise from the score alone, and only by seeing the work can one appreciate its conceptual genius. Preposterous dramaturgical disproportion and non sequitur mingle hilariously with musical material of genuine high quality (especially the ‘Song to Mars’ ensemble, the love duets, Tilburina’s ‘Scherzino pazzo’ and the bizarre ‘Intermezzo alla Cecilia’, mimed by an indecisive Lord Burleigh to the accompaniment of an elegiac concertante movement for viola and orchestra) which, together with its intricate matrix of choice (and even subtly concealed) musical quotations (ranging from Handel and Arne to Donizetti, Mascagni, Verdi, Meyerbeer, Parry, Wagner and Stanford himself), coalesce to shape a surprisingly cogent two-act opera and concluding ‘Masque’. Notwithstanding Stanford’s innate ability to laugh at the genre he so venerated, The Critic embodies an uncannily modern, almost timeless aura of which Wexford’s outstanding revival has abundantly informed us. Such operatic prowess, essayed with comparable originality in his last, intensely lyrical and masterly opera, The Travelling Companion (1917), should surely prompt us (as Vaughan Williams and Finzi advocated) to acknowledge his much-neglected contribution to English opera before the advent of Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett.