STANFORD, SIR CHARLES VILLIERS Irish composer, was born in Dublin on Sept. 3o, 1852. After studying in London under Ernst Pauer he won (1870) a scholar ship at Queen's College, Cambridge, whence he migrated to Trin ity College in 1873, and succeeded J. L. Hopkins as college or ganist, a post he held till 1892. His appointment as conductor of the Cambridge University Musical Society gave him great op portunities. In 1874 to 1877 he visited Germany each year, study ing under Reinecke and Kiel. His first important composition was incidental music to Tennyson's Queen Mary (Lyceum, 1876). In 1881 his opera, The Veiled Prophet, was given at Hanover; followed by Savonarola (Hamburg and Covent Garden, 1884), and The Canterbury Pilgrims (Drury Lane, 1884). A long in terval separates these from his later operas, Shamus O'Brien, the least pretending but most successful of all his dramatic works (Opera Comique, 1896) and Much Ado About Nothing (Covent Garden, 19o1).
Meanwhile he had been appointed professor of composition at the Royal College of Music in 1883; conductor of the Bach choir in 1885; professor of music in the university of Cambridge, suc ceeding Sir G. A. Macfarren, in 1887; conductor of the Leeds Phil harmonic Society, in 1897, and of the Leeds Festival from 1901 onwards. He was knighted in 1902 and died in London on March 29, 1924. His instrumental works include six symphonies, many chamber compositions, among them two string quartets; besides many songs, part-songs, madrigals, etc., and incidental music to the Eumenides and Oedipus Rex (as performed at Cambridge), as well as to Tennyson's Becket. His last operatic work was The Travelling Companion, posthumously produced in 1926. His church music and editions of Irish and other songs are well known.
See his Studies and Memories (1908), and Pages from an Unwritten Diary (1914).