Charles Stanford - On Time, Op. 142 SATB/SATB (1914)

Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (30 September 1852 – 29 March 1924) was an Irish composer, music teacher, and conductor. 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.

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On Time, Op. 142 for Double Chorus a capella SATB/SATB (1914)
Lyricist: John Milton (1608-1674)
composed for the Bristol Madrigal Society

Tenebrae conducted by Nigel Short

Stanford’s setting of Milton’s On Time, Op 142, and Parry’s setting of Keats’s ballad La belle dame sans merci were both composed in 1914 for the Bristol Madrigal Society, as commemorative pieces for the Jubilee of the Society’s conductor, Daniel Wilberforce Rootham. Sung by the Society in a ‘Ladies’ Night’ programme given on 14 January 1915 in the Victoria Rooms, Bristol, under Rootham’s direction, both works made considerable demands on the Society’s singers.

Stanford’s brilliant canvas for double choir powerfully communicates Milton’s contempt for Time, which may consume all before it, but man, touched by the divine, is more fortunate in his inheritance of eternal life. The overwhelming mood of Stanford’s choral song is one of haste and urgency in both the opening paragraph (‘Fly envious Time’) and the impatience of the rousing coda (‘Attir’d with Stars, we shall for ever sit’), but perhaps most striking of all is the expression of hope and aspiration of the central exultation (‘Then long Eternity shall greet our bliss’).
from notes by Jeremy Dibble © 2016