The outbreak of war on 4 August 1914 and the publication of Stanford's autobiography, Pages from an Unwritten Diary, marked an important watershed in his life. The autobiography in many ways tacitly acknowledged that his career and position as one of Britain's foremost composers now no longer existed. Nevertheless, one of the book's many purposes was to record for posterity the author's role in the ‘English Musical Renaissance’ at a time when, Stanford sensed, Britain's new musical confidence in the music of Elgar, Delius, Grainger and Vaughan Williams appeared to turn its back on its late nineteenth-century heritage, a heritage Stanford was at pains to point out, enjoyed the pedigree of his communion with the continental giants. Pages from an Unwritten Diary also summarised most of Stanford's perennial campaigns and protests – his case for English church music, a national opera, a proper ethic for music publishing and the need for a proper musical infrastructure through state subvention – but the book also devoted many pages to his Irish background, the aim of which was not only to indulge in nostalgia, but to lay emphasis on a ‘golden age’ of Anglo-Irishmen who had enriched the British Empire in all walks of professional life. Stanford wanted to be part of this ‘brilliant’ generation whose power and influence he knew was about to disappear.

The action of the German Army and the Kaiser was a source of disbelief and exasperation to Stanford. To him, Germany had become artistically decadent, a predicament he blamed on unification in 1870 and the centralising of power in Berlin:

Debate about reform of the Professorship of Music had taken place ten years earlier, in 1877, when a report of the Board of Musical Studies ‘considered it would be extremely beneficial if the Professor should reside for a period of (or periods equivalent to) not less than one term in each academic year, and thus take a more continuous and systematic part in the musical teaching of the University.’ It was thus recognised that an increase in the annual stipend would be necessary, ‘the present stipend being wholly insufficient to compensate a first rate musician, not already located in Cambridge, for the loss of professional income which such residence would involve.’ Yet, within a fortnight of Macfarren's death, recommendations were made to Senate that the fundamental conditions of the Professorship in Music would remain unchanged, even though it was evident from the Cambridge Reporter that the present position was unsatisfactory. Senate was advised, however, that it was an unfavourable time to place increased financial demands on the University chest, and so the post was advertised with the usual exemption from residence and no increase in the present stipend. Four candidates were short listed: Dr George Garrett (organist of St John's College), Edwin. M. Lott (organist of St Sepulchre's Church), Ebenezer Prout (Guildhall School of Music) and Stanford. From the panel of nine electors, who were all present, all votes were given for Stanford who was duly elected on 7 December 1887. The declaration of office and admission to the post were effected in the presence of the Vice-Chancellor and Registrar the following day. As Professor of Music, Stanford wished to be admitted as soon as possible to the degree of Doctor of Music. At Senate it was agreed as a matter of formality that the usual examinations and exercises for musical degrees be waived, but it was nevertheless proposed that Stanford should be admitted first to the Bachelor of Music and then to the degree of ‘Doctor Designate’. This course of action was, however, withdrawn at Stanford's request, and instead he was admitted as Doctor of Music honoris causa on 8 November 1888.

The beginning of January 1888 was marred by the sad news of the death of Marian Jenkinson, Jennie Stanford's youngest sister (the fifth daughter of Champion Wetton). In 1887 she had married Francis Jenkinson but the union only lasted a mere four months.

My first contact with the music of Stanford was as a nine-year-old boy singing ‘Windy Nights’ (from A Child's Garland of Songs Op. 30) at the Stratford Festival; it was a song I particularly enjoyed, and to hear it sung many years later by Stephen Varcoe (surely one of this country's finest executants of English song) brought back many happy and vivid memories. Further acquaintance with Stanford's music included the immutable Evening Service in B flat, ‘Trottin’ to the fair’, the Three Latin Motets, Op. 38 and ‘The Blue Bird’, all of which, in their different apparels, struck me as strikingly original in design and expression. Thanks principally to the work of a highly imaginative and energetic music master, John Rippin, my knowledge of Stanford's church music broadened at grammar school. It was he who initially opened my eyes to Stanford's impeccable craftsmanship and originality and made me aware of the ‘other’ Stanford, a much-neglected composer of works such as the ‘Irish’ Symphony, the Songs of the Sea, the Songs of the Fleet, the funeral march from Becket, the Fourth Irish Rhapsody and the Second Piano Concerto. The quality, diversity and flawless professionalism of these rarely performed pieces took me aback and their distinctiveness seemed hard to reconcile with much of the casual criticism that dismissed Stanford as little more than a minor eclectic. During the late 1970s, as an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge (where, to my delight, Stanford had been organist for nineteen years), my interest developed into a passion. With the encouragement of Philip Radcliffe, Richard Marlow and Peter Le Huray, who were largely responsible for encouraging me to pursue serious research into both Parry and Stanford, I began gradually to realise how little in the way of critical writings existed on both composers. It was to Parry that I devoted my initial attention, but while my work focused on him, it seemed inevitable that I would also feel the compulsion to make a study of Stanford at a later date. Significantly, this compulsion was founded not on the common textbook ‘partnership’ – ‘Parry ‘n Stanford’, the English Musical Renaissance's answer to Marks and Spencer – but on a desire to promote the essential and marked differences between the two men and their music, differences defined by aspiration, temperament and personal circumstances.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Dublin's musical life had experienced a decline, though as Brian Boydell has demonstrated, this was not due initially to the Act of Union. In fact it was only in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and agricultural depression in the 1820s that the dissolution of Dublin as a social centre began to occur as many of the aristocracy and landed gentry turned their attention towards London. The inevitable effect of this shift in focus was, however, to signal a corresponding decline in public interest and patronage, the former of which only beginning to re-awaken as the new ‘professional aristocracy’ used their own increasing prosperity to encourage the arts. That over twenty new music societies came into being between 1840 and the end of the 1860s is demonstrative of this new momentum, and judging from the notices in the mid-century issues of Freeman's Journal and Saunders News Letter, music-making in Dublin certainly equalled that of its pre-Union days and possibly even exceeded it . Among the more significant of these societies were the Dublin Mechanics’ Choral Society (1850), the Royal Choral Institute (1851), the Dublin Mercantile Choral Union (1854) and the Amateur Musical Society (founded by George Lee in 1852). Mindful of the private nature of other musical societies, these bodies attempted to reach out to the working classes in order to introduce them to the great choral works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this venture they were largely successful. John William Glover, organist of St Mary's Pro-Cathedral and founder of the Royal Choral Institute gave performances of Handel's Samson, Messiah¸ Alexander's Feast and Jephtha, Haydn's Creation, Mendelssohn's Elijah and, more entrepreneurially, Schumann's Paradise and the Peri (its first hearing in Ireland in 1854). It was the maturer organisations, however, such as the Philharmonic Society (the successor to the Anacreontic Society) and the Antient Concert Society, founded in 1826 and 1834 respectively, that played a major role in the city's musical life. The Antient Concert Society endeavoured to produce an average of five choral concerts during the season, and under Robinson's direction became a focal point of Dublin's musical life. As a distinguishing feature, the Philharmonic concerts tended to place emphasis on orchestral works and were modestly successful in attracting virtuosi such as Thalberg, Hallé, Joachim and Rubinstein to play concertos for them. The quality of performances was, however, distinctly variable; the orchestra was entirely amateur in constitution and the rough quality of sound was not enhanced by its less than competent conductor Henry Bussell, a parochial organist ‘who was a kindly Englishman of exceptional stodginess, scarcely knew one end of the stick from the other, and was certainly incapable of reading a score to any advantage either to himself or to his myrmidons’. Nevertheless, Bussell did manage to undertake the first performance in Ireland of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in 1856 which elicited approbation from the press. The Antient Concerts and those for the Philharmonic were essentially the preserve of the wealthier Protestant classes. Confined to members and their guests, their concerts were formal occasions requiring evening dress and thereby carried an air of social caché.

At the end of 1900 troops from the Boer War returned home to a hero's welcome as they marched through the dense crowds of London. Lord Salisbury's government had been re-elected with another huge majority, winning on the back of the South African victory, and accusing the Liberal opposition (who opposed the war) of lacking patriotism. Euphoria after the success in South Africa largely concealed the high casualties (over 11,000 men), the ensuing guerrilla war still being prosecuted by pockets of Boers in the Veldt, and the guilty horrors of the concentration camps. Britain, as part of an allied force, had helped to suppress the Boxer Rebellion in China and signed a pact with the Imperial German Government to protect the trading ports of China. Yet, in spite of this show of solidarity by Britain and Germany, there was an inexorable underlying rivalry between the two countries which was reflected in the burgeoning arms race. In Paris the fifth congress of the Socialist International took place to oppose the threat of militarism and war, but its vocal protests did little to influence the growing international instability of the European continent. In Britain the Labour Party was born as the trade unions and three socialist societies gave their assent to a proposal from the Scottish miner James Keir Hardie for a party with a broad church of views to act in Parliament. It was a time of great progress in science with Planck's ‘Quantum Theory’, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, Evans's archaeological revelations at Knossos on Crete and the flying of Count Zeppelin's airship, while many citizens of Europe travelled to Paris to enjoy the spectacle of the World Exhibition.

On 22 January 1901 the death of Queen Victoria was announced. Coming at the dawn of the new century, her passing marked the end of an era. For Stanford, whose life had been completely shaped by the reign of Britain's longest reigning monarch, the end of her reign also spelt a change in artistic fortune and reception. With the advent of the Enigma Variations, the Sea Pictures, The Dream of Gerontius at Birmingham (albeit in a disastrous performance), the new overture Cockaigne and the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, not only had the public taken Elgar to their hearts, but conductors such as Richter and Henry Wood were full of unbridled enthusiasm for the new man.

A town mouse I was born and bred, and the town which sheltered me was one likely to leave its mark upon its youngest citizens, and to lay up for them vivid and stirring memories. Dublin, as I woke to it, was a city of glaring contrasts. Grandeur and squalor lived next door to each other, squalor sometimes under the roof of grandeur. Society, ‘The Quality’ as the Irishman calls it, had deserted its centre and made its home in the outskirts: houses of perfect architectural proportions had become tenements; Adam's ceilings and Angelica Kauffman's designs looked down upon squalling families in rags and tatters. The hall where Handel conducted the first performance of the ‘Messiah’ had become a low theatre. The two old cathedrals stood in a region compared to which the Seven Dials was a Paradise. But the well-to-do classes, who had turned their faces outwards, had built up a town which, if it had its usual quota of dull featureless streets, was not wanting in a good sprinkling of private houses of artistic merit, and in open spaces and squares of a beauty quite unique in this country.

Stanford's recollections of his home-town, written and published over sixty years after his birth, depict a city of social deprivation, class disparity and former Georgian affluence. In the first fifty years of the nineteenth century, Dublin had undergone considerable change in terms of its social and political geography. With the Act of Union in 1801, the sudden loss of 271 peers and 300 members of the Irish house of commons made itself felt both socially and economically as the city lost its status as parliamentary capital of Ireland. Many wealthy Protestant families of the nobility and gentry migrated for London; those that stayed invariably left their elegant eighteenth-century homes in the city and moved to the southern suburbs such as Rathmines and Pembroke. The Catholic middle classes, who also supported the notion of the Union, believed they might gain emancipation. As a result, areas in the centre of Dublin such as Summerhill and Dominick Street ‘passed from quality to vacancy and then on to tenement’. Large houses, requiring the wealth of an aristocrat to maintain them, lay outside the limited resources of Dublin's middle classes and so fell into decay. Others survived owing largely to their being bought up by religious orders or other institutions.

The chapter surveys the varied contexts within which Vaughan Williams’s concert music was performed in Britain, showing how he developed his distinctive voice within established frameworks of concert life around the country.

In London, opportunities before the First World War were at first concentrated on vocal and chamber concerts, with large-scale works generally heard outside the capital, as at the Leeds and Three Choirs Festivals. A surge of public interest in European modernism in London during the 1910s was of only limited value for British composers, but the premiere of the London Symphony in 1914 proved a landmark in establishing Vaughan Williams’s reputation in the orchestral sphere.

After the war, his position began to solidify, not least through Adrian Boult’s advocacy in Birmingham and at the BBC. But the latter’s role in encouraging a new wave of modernist music offered a further threat to British composers (repertoire graphs of the 1912–13 and 1933–4 seasons point up the similarity). Nevertheless, the chapter suggests the possibility of co-existing streams of alternative new musics, and Vaughan Williams was deliberately positioned in this way, not least through the astringencies of the Fourth Symphony.

After 1945 his music was celebrated rather more formally in various cycles of symphonies, but a persuasive new advocate emerged in John Barbirolli at the Hallé.

This chapter indicates some of the changes in the condition of the British composer between the pre–First World War situation that Vaughan Williams had outlined in ‘Who Wants the English Composer?’ and the developments that began to come into place in the 1920s and 1930s. It focusses on aspects of fresh leadership, opportunities, and practical encouragement as evidenced through Hugh Allen and the Royal College of Music, Adrian Boult and the British Broadcasting Corporation, and Hubert Foss and the Oxford University Press Music Department. The Royal College of Music became a composers’ resource, its orchestra and the new Parry theatre offering opportunities for composers to try out works in rehearsal or on the stage. Boult’s championship of British composition was evident in his Royal College conducting class and from his assiduous broadcasting of British composers at the BBC. British music publishers were slow to appreciate the opportunities of income deriving from performance and broadcasting rights, clinging to the tradition of revenue meaning copies sold. But these new income streams enabled material change, and Hubert Foss persuaded OUP to publish serious orchestral music by young British talent. In all of this, Vaughan Williams was an essential point of influence and example.

To explore Vaughan Williams in context is a peculiarly appropriate project for a figure who famously declared: ‘The composer must not shut himself up and think about art, he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community’. Indeed, this quotation will be encountered frequently throughout this book. Across a career that stretched from the 1890s to the late 1950s, Vaughan Williams produced a huge and varied body of music; he also worked to promote and more deeply embed music within social and cultural life in England and Britain more broadly, achieving this through his compositions for amateur as well as professional musicians, and through his related work as a folk-song collector and arranger, hymn editor, writer, lecturer, radio broadcaster, administrator, conductor, and musical-, educational-, and social activist. By the interwar years Vaughan Williams was regarded as the most important English composer of his time, and, by the end of the Second World War, he had become a national if not an international celebrity.