The Critic, Op. 144 (1915), is an opera by Charles Villiers Stanford. [1]
Sir Charles Villiers Stanford was an Anglo-Irish composer, music teacher, and conductor of the late Romantic era. Born to a well-off and highly musical family in Dublin, Stanford was educated at the University of Cambridge before studying music in Leipzig and Berlin. He was instrumental in raising the status of the Cambridge University Musical Society, attracting international stars to perform with it.
An organ scholar is a young musician employed as a part-time assistant organist at a cathedral, church or institution where regular choral services are held. The idea of an organ scholarship is to provide the holder with playing, directing and administrative experience. It is an important part of music-making in Christian worship and is strongly associated with, but is not limited to, Anglican church music in the United Kingdom, Australia and the USA.
Edward Joseph Dent, generally known as Edward J. Dent, was an English musicologist, teacher, translator and critic. A leading figure of musicology and music criticism, Dent was Professor of Music at the University of Cambridge between 1926 and 1941.
The Critic: or, a Tragedy Rehearsed is a satire by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. It was first staged at Drury Lane Theatre in 1779. It is a burlesque on stage acting and play production conventions, and Sheridan considered the first act to be his finest piece of writing. One of its major roles, Sir Fretful Plagiary, is a comment on the vanity of authors, and in particular a caricature of the dramatist Richard Cumberland who was a contemporary of Sheridan.
The Dresden amen is a sequence of seven notes sung by choirs during church services in the German state of Saxony since the beginning of the 19th century. The motif was first used in, and is particularly associated with, the city of Dresden.
Nicholas Comyn Gatty was an English composer and music critic. As a composer his major output was opera, which was generally musically undistinguished but well-presented theatrically. As a critic he worked for the Pall Mall Gazette and The Times, and served as assistant editor for the second and third editions of Grove.
Julian Russell Sturgis was a British-American novelist, poet, librettist and lyricist.
John Alexander Fuller Maitland was an influential British music critic and scholar from the 1880s to the 1920s. He encouraged the rediscovery of English music of the 16th and 17th centuries, particularly Henry Purcell's music and English virginal music. He also propounded the notion of an English Musical Renaissance in the second half of the 19th century, particularly praising Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry.
The English Musical Renaissance was a hypothetical development in the late 19th and early 20th century, when British composers, often those lecturing or trained at the Royal College of Music, were said to have freed themselves from foreign musical influences, to have begun writing in a distinctively national idiom, and to have equalled the achievement of composers in mainland Europe. The idea gained considerable currency at the time, with support from prominent music critics, but from the latter part of the 20th century has been less widely propounded.
Much Ado About Nothing is an opera in four acts by Charles Villiers Stanford, to a libretto by Julian Sturgis based on Shakespeare's play Much Ado About Nothing. It was the composer's seventh completed opera.
The Critic is an American animated TV series 1994–1995.
Joseph Bennett was an English music critic and librettist. After an early career as a schoolmaster and organist, he was engaged as a music critic by The Sunday Times in 1865. Within five years he was appointed chief music critic of The Daily Telegraph, a post he held from 1870 to 1906.
William Barclay Squire was a British musicologist, librarian and librettist.
George H. Jessop was an Irish playwright, journalist and novelist. Born in Doory Hall, Ballymahon, County Longford, in 1852, he died in Hampstead, London, in 1915. Jessop lived and worked in the United States for many years.
Thomas O'Brien Butler, was an Irish composer who wrote the Irish-language opera Muirgheis (1903).
Three Latin Motets, Op. 38, is a collection of three sacred motets based on Latin texts for mixed unaccompanied choir by Charles Villiers Stanford, comprising Justorum animae, Coelos ascendit hodie and Beati quorum via. The texts come from different sources, and the scoring is for four to eight parts. They were published by Boosey & Co in 1905. The works, some of Stanford's few settings of church music in Latin, have remained in the choral repertoire internationally and are performed in liturgies and concert.
The Veiled Prophet is an 1877 romantic opera in three acts by Charles Villiers Stanford to a libretto by William Barclay Squire based on the 1817 poem "The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan" by Thomas Moore. It was first performed in Hanover in 1881, in German. Its sole British performance was given in Italian at the Royal Opera House, London, in 1893, and its first performance in its original English version was at the Wexford Festival in 2019.
The Blue Bird is a partsong composed by Charles Villiers Stanford in 1910. It is set to the words of L'Oiseau Bleu, a poem by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, which depicts a bluebird in flight over a lake. It is written for soprano, divided altos, tenor and bass. "The Blue Bird" is the third of Stanford's Eight Part Songs which are all settings of texts by Coleridge. It was widely performed by choral societies in England during Stanford's life and is considered one of the best English partsongs ever written. It has been recorded by ensembles including The Cambridge Singers, Oxford Camerata, Tenebrae, and the Gabrieli Consort.
The Travelling Companion is a 1925 opera by Charles Villiers Stanford based on the tale by Hans Christian Andersen.
In the summer of 1915 Stanford began work on his third comic opera, The Critic or An Opera Rehearsed, taken from the largely unaltered second and third acts of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's eponymous play in a libretto constructed by Lewis Cairns James (a colleague at the RCM) and, to a lesser extent, by Stanford himself.