Born into a Dublin legal family on 30th September 1852, Stanford entered Queens’ College, Cambridge in 1870. Appointed organist at Trinity College in 1874, he spent much of the next three years studying in Germany. Appointed Professor of Music at Cambridge in 1887, he overhauled the university’s music faculty and oversaw the music society’s silver jubilee, when honorary doctorates were awarded to such composers as Tchaikovsky and Saint-Saëns. In 1883 he had been made the Professor of Composition at the newlyfounded Royal College of Music, where he taught an impressive number of composers including Bridge, Butterworth, Moeran and Vaughan Williams. He had lengthy conducting stints with the Bach Choir and Leeds Philharmonic Society, was awarded numerous honorary doctorates and received a knighthood in 1902. He died, the respected but largely out-of-touch ‘grand old man’ of British music, in London on 29th March 1924
