5 - The Royal College of Music (1883–7): Disappointment and Revival

Summary

On 16 February 1882 Stanford received an official letter from the Prince of Wales inviting him to a meeting at St James's Palace on 28 February in order to discuss the establishment of a new college of music to replace the National Training School. The very issue of a new Royal College of Music had been the subject of debate for some time, for which there were delicate political matters to resolve. The Royal Academy of Music had once been the target of Henry Cole's aspirations for a new, enlarged national conservatory of music; but after the plan was rejected by Sterndale Bennett, who wanted the RAM to remain independent, Cole decided to push ahead with his own plans for a National Training School of Music with royal support.1 The project of the NTSM, opened in 1876 under the direction of Arthur Sullivan, was brought to a close under the leadership of John Stainer in 1882. Though moderately successful in its aims, the NTSM had never been more than a preliminary foundation for a more socially progressive institution initially conceived by the Prince Consort after the Great Exhibition in 1851.

Momentum for the new college began to gather during 1881, and in 1882 discussion of its constitution, accommodation and concomitant finance, with George Grove at the helm, was ubiquitous in the musical press. Stanford, anxious to be included in the new venture – he had been too young and inexperienced for the NTSM – accepted the Prince of Wales's invitation to attend the first meeting at St James's Palace in February 1882 with alacrity. Privately he expressed his views on the matter with Hudson, and there was even the suggestion that, if London did not want the new conservatoire, then it might be situated in Cambridge:

You know of course that the Academy has refused to unite itself to the South Kensington Music School. The idea is to make the South Kensington School an incorporated or affiliated (to be subsequently settled) school of music to the University, an arrangement which will put an end to the present anomaly of musical degrees without musical education.

We shall have P. Wales, D. Edinburgh, P. Christian, and all the swells with us, besides the purse strings of Freake and others who will do anything to make the School a genuine school of real art.