John Stainer: A Life in Music

One of the most important musicians of the Victorian era, Stainer's reputation is grounded in his Anglican liturgical compositions, but his corpus of secular works - madrigals and songs - is also full of inventiveness and surprises.
Stainer's life is a story of extraordinary social mobility. From lowly origins he rose to become organist of St Paul's Cathedral and Professor of Music at Oxford. He was a brilliant organist, a fine scholar, theorist, pedagogue and teacher, multifarious attributes which this study explores to illustrate the breadth of his musical personality. Yet after his premature death in 1901 his reputation almost immediately plummeted, except for the popularity of a handful of works, among them I saw the Lord and The Crucifixion.
Stainer's reputation and the crucial contribution he made to musical life are triumphantly reasserted here, through Jeremy Dibble's examination of the breadth of his work as a composer, and the important role he played in the regeneration of sacred and secular musical institutions in Victorian Britain.

Jeremy Dibble is Professor of Music at Durham University.