“Any study of the Victorian musical world and the later nineteenth century sooner or later brings one into contact with John Stainer. A towering figure in the field of Anglican church music and in the nation’s ‘organ’ world, he was also deeply influential in pedagogy, scholarship, the country’s institutional development of musical training and the musical lives of London and Oxford. [He] was the archetypal Victorian composer, embodying many of those central values associated with the era—the supreme position of the cathedral organist, the pre-eminence of the organ loft as the musical locus of training and the role of church music as a compositional aspiration.” Thus opens the preface to John Stainer: A Life in Music, one of the recent and extraordinary Boydell & Brewer publications, by the erudite and imaginative author Jeremy Dibble.
Dibble closes his study in the following manner: “Stainer may be fairly termed the epitome of the Victorian composer. He was born three years after Queen Victoria acceded to the throne (and in the year of her marriage to Prince Albert) and died only ten weeks after her death. Until recently such a description, with its entrenched prejudices, would have led to a curt dismissal of him, but a reappraisal of all things Victorian demands that we reassess the role of John Stainer. As a man of energy, conviction, vision, passion, and academic vigor (and one that greatly benefited from Oxford’s Liberal intellectual milieu) he was a towering figure in the Victorian musical world, and, while he could not boast the higher profiles of Sullivan, Parry, or Stanford, his contribution to the larger fabric of Britain’s music—in the Anglican cathedral and parish church, the Anglican hymn, the Christmas carol, education, the science of bells, musicology and the nation’s musical institutions—was substantial and lasting. Moreover, in an age where anti-Victorian prejudices are themselves now completely outdated, the range and beauty of Stainer’s achievements require more urgent revisiting to appreciate their individuality, sincerity and germane role.”
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