in the chorus at the Royal Albert Hall when Richard Wagner conducted, and he visited Bayreuth and Dresden. He later prepared the Royal Choral Society in Wagner's Parsifal for two concert performances at the Royal Albert Hall in 1884. Faning began composing while a student, producing an overture and two string quartets in 1871, and a symphony in 1872. In 1873 he was elected an extra Mendelssohn Scholar, and in 1876 he obtained the Lucas silver medal for composition for his setting of the Magnificat. Sir John Stainer heard the work and selected it for performance at the Festival of the Sons of the Clergy in 1878, and the publishers Novello & Co printed an edition of the score. During his Academy years, he was organist successively of St. Thomas's Church, Paddington and St. John's Church, Lewisham. He conducted two amateur musical societies and "Mr. Eaton Faning's Select Choir," a professional group that sang at Boosey's London Ballad Concerts. Composer and teacher Faning was appointed to the staff of the Academy in 1874 as a sub-professor of harmony, an assistant professor of the piano in 1877, and full professor a year later. In 1877 he was elected an Associate, and in 1881 a Fellow of the Academy, its highest honour for a former student. On 18 July 1877, the Academy hosted the performance of Faning's comic operetta in one act, The Two Majors. The libretto, by Edward Rose, was adapted from one of W. S. Gilbert's "Bab Ballads". Sullivan "took a warm and practical interest" in the composition of Faning's score. The piece was described by The Musical Times as "highly amusing and capital … with its clever parodies of some of the absurdities of Italian opera … capitally rendered, under the composer's direction". Another critic praised the music and the staging, though adding that as it was a student performance, "there was a necessary elongation of those garments over which the Lord Chamberlain traditionally keeps such jealous watch and ward." The success of Faning's piece led the faculty of the Academy to establish an operatic class. In October 1881, Faning's second comic operetta, Mock Turtles, was produced at the Savoy Theatre as a curtain-raiser to Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience. It ran in tandem with Patience and then Iolanthe until March 1883. The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company also toured the piece in the British provinces. In 1882 Faning wrote his