Chapter 2 - Stanford and Tennyson: The Musical Promotion of a Poet

Summary

[Stanford's music] is in the best sense of the word Victorian, that is to say it is the musical counterpart of the art of Tennyson, Watts and Mat[t]hew Arnold.

Vaughan Williams' tribute to his old teacher in 1924 is only one of many invocations of parallels between the music of Charles Villiers Stanford and the poetry of Alfred Tennyson. J. A. Fuller Maitland highlighted a ‘strong feeling for colour’ in the work of both men, whilst Ernest Walker identified Stanford's ‘Tennysonian spirit’ in his ‘great partiality for words dealing with nature, especially with the sea, or expressing the romantic side of patriotism’. Of course, Stanford was not the only composer to use Tennyson as a source of inspiration. In 1892 the Guardian reported that ‘An industrious statistician has discovered that there are over five hundred settings of poems by the late Lord Tennyson, but it is to be feared that only in a small fraction of the number is the music fit company for the words’ – singling out Stanford's The Revenge as a successful exception; more recently, Jeffrey Richards has listed several parallels between Sullivan and Tennyson, Stephen Banfield has highlighted the historical importance of Arthur Somervell's 1899 song-cycle Maud, and both Parry and Elgar have been identified as strong readers of the choric song from ‘The Lotos-Eaters’. However, Stanford's Tennysonian works (Table 1) represent the most sustained musical refiguring by any British composer, acknowledging Tennyson not only as a poet who wrote on heroic, elegiac, religious, patriotic and mythological themes, but also as a dramatist.