The Crucifixion is the major work by Sir John Stainer, one of the leading British composers of the Victorian age, particularly in the field of church music.

John Stainer (1840 - 1901) was the son of a schoolmaster who was so passionately devoted to music that the family had five pianos and an organ in the house. He was a chorister at St. Paul's Cathedral and therefore attended the Cathedral School, where he was taught general studies and received a musical education. When he was 16, Sir Frederick Ouseley invited him to the post of organist at Tenbury College, Worcestershire, which Ouseley had recently founded to improve church music. Ouseley continued to teach Stainer, who obtained a Bachelor of Music degree at Oxford by examination.

The examination must have been impressive, for he was hired right away as organist at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1860, and in the next year became the official organist of the University itself. This gave him an opportunity to study there for a Bachelor of Arts degree; he composed his other oratorio, Gideon, as his doctoral dissertation at Oxford. In 1872, Stainer returned full circle when he received the prestigious appointment of organist at St. Paul's.

The Crucifixion illustrates that Ouseley's instincts were sound when he tapped Stainer to help fulfill his ideal of improving church music. Stainer mostly confined his composing to the task of creating high-quality music for church use. His characteristics include a strongly meditative quality, good melodies, and superb part-writing that engages the amateur singers or a church choir who don't happen to have the melody line. Overall the quality of his works is variable, sometimes compromised by the sentimentality that was popular at the time. Stainer himself believed that he was not in a league with the great masters. Yet there is a quantity of work in his catalog that does not deserve that harsh self-judgment, instances where Stainer rose to create strong, memorable music. The Crucifixion is one of them.

Stainer's major oratorio is written with such amateur singers in mind. In form and perhaps it follows the example of Mendelssohn's Elijah and Paulus (which were then taken in England as the ideal of the oratorio form in the Romantic Age), But those works and Elgar's soon-to-be-composed Dream of Gerontius are best sung by highly accomplished choirs, and are composed with full orchestral accompaniment.

The Crucifixion, on the other hand, is performable by a good parish church choir, and its accompaniment is for organ, calling for an organist of the good professional quality that was expected in such British churches. It is in 20 movements, with a text by Sparrow Swallow that tells the story of the arrest, trial, torture, and execution of Jesus Christ.

The Crucifixion remains the best-known major work by Stainer, and was the source of an anthem, "All for Jesus," that became independently popular. After its premiere he was knighted by Queen Victoria for services to music.

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