Charles Villiers Stanford

Songs of the Sea is the Esoteric Pick of the Week. If you haven’t been spending much time at the beach, you’re missing out. El Niño is here and the water feels so good, you might be inspired to sing your own song of the sea.

There are too many compositions about the sea to count. There are the famous compositions such as La Mer, “Scheherazade” and the overture to The Flying Dutchman. There are the less famous such as Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, and Delius’s Sea Drift.

There is even a new composition by John Luther Adams entitled Become Ocean which the La Jolla Symphony will perform in its upcoming season.

There are several largely unknown compositions about the sea by composers such as Elgar, Bloch, Coates, McCunn, Einaudi, and Charles Stanford.

Charles Stanford wrote Songs of the Sea in 1902 and it is lovely. Charming and lovely. Those are two concepts that have been vacated by composers of “serious music.” No one wants to be charming or lovely, let alone both. Music must now hold us all accountable for our inauthentic, bougie lives.

If we were to chose cynicism we could discuss this music as informal Victorian propaganda much the same way as the waltzes of the Strauss family and the operettas of Lehar could be discussed as Habsburg propaganda.

1902, the year this music was premiered, was a politically difficult one in Britain because of the atrocities of the Second Boer War.

Atrocity is a strong word but there is really no other way to put it. We get the terms of “scorched earth policy” and “concentration camps” courtesy of this war. Was it coincidence that in 1902, King Edward VII asked Elgar to set words to his famous Pomp and Circumstance tune, resulting in the iconic Land of Hope and Glory?

It is easy for us to look back on Victorian composers such as Stanford and condemn them for writing music which enabled and coddled the bourgeois while Oliver Twist starved in the streets of London and all of India was treated as a collection of sub-humanity.

As is the current case in the United States, the general population of the British Empire was blissfully unaware of how their wars were fought and how the policies of their government subdued the populations on distant shores. Was their some willful ignorance? Probably.

Add to that the fact that Stanford was a conservative, which had many of the same connotations as in current politics, and you get music that is saccharine and proud of itself.

Having said all that, I like Stanford’s music and I like his Songs of the Sea just as much as I like The Merry Widow by Lehar, and any of the Strauss waltzes.

I think Stanford would find a welcome reception in many concert halls as a programming substitute for, say, a Tchaikovsky overture.