Any study of the Victorian musical world and the later nineteenth century sooner or later brings one into contact with John Stainer. A towering figure in the field of Anglican church music and in the nation's ‘organ’ world, he was also deeply influential in pedagogy, scholarship, the country's institutional development of musical training and the musical lives of London and Oxford. Born three years after Queen Victoria came to the throne (and during the year of her marriage to Prince Albert), he died prematurely at 60, his life spanning her entire reign. In this respect he was the archetypal Victorian composer, embodying many of those central values associated with the era – the supreme position of the cathedral organist, the pre-eminence of the organ loft as the musical locus of training and the role of church music as a compositional aspiration.

He died a much-respected man for his contribution to the musical life of the nation – the dinner thrown for him on his retirement from St Paul's in 1888 has rarely if ever been equalled – yet in the Edwardian age, and especially after World War I, he suffered the ignominy of almost total neglect and excoriation from a generation who wanted to turn its back on the composer of The Crucifixion and ‘High Victorianism’ as aberrations of an artistically infertile era and a period of musical values which, as Ernest Walker commented in 1907, were characterised by ‘a tide of sentimentalism’, ‘cheaply sugary harmony’ and ‘palsied part-writing’, and ‘whose normal attitude involved the sacrifice by the musician of some of his musicianship in the supposed interest of religion’.