Charles Villiers Stanford was born in Dublin on 30 September 1852, the only son of a prominent lawyer who was a cellist and a bass singer good enough to take the title role in the Irish premiere of Elijah, and of an amateur pianist who could play concerto solo parts in public. His parents hired a succession of teachers in violin, piano, organ and composition, three of them former pupils of Moscheles; his godmother Elizabeth Meeke taught him to sight-read before he was twelve by making him play a Chopin mazurka at the end of every lesson without stopping for mistakes, all fifty-two of them in turn. He gave a recital at seven and had a march written at eight performed in the Theatre Royal pantomime three years later. He read at Cambridge, was appointed organist of Trinity College while still an undergraduate, and then studied in Leipzig and Berlin. He died on 29 March 1924.

In 1882, at twenty-nine, he was one of the founding professors of the Royal College of Music and taught composition there for the rest of his life, adding the Cambridge chair of music from 1887; sceptical of modernism, he taught from classical principles as he found them in Brahms, and his pupils included Holst and Vaughan Williams, whose reputations overtook his own. He raised the standing of the Cambridge University Musical Society by bringing international soloists to it, and conducted the Bach Choir and the Leeds Triennial Festival. He wrote seven symphonies and nine completed operas, none of which held the stage, but his Anglican service music and church choral works remain in constant use. With Parry and Mackenzie he was credited with a renaissance in British music, before Elgar and his own students eclipsed him.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Villiers_Stanford
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q368264