Vincent Novello


Vincent Novello, was an English musician and music publisher born in London. He was an organist, chorister, conductor and composer, but he is best known for bringing to England many works now considered standards, and with his son he created a major music publishing house.

Life

Vincent, born at 240 Oxford Street, was the son of Giuseppe Novello, an Italian confectioner who moved to London in 1771. As a boy Vincent was a chorister at the Sardinian Embassy Chapel in Duke Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, where he learnt the organ from Samuel Webbe; and from 1796 to 1822 he became in succession organist of the Sardinian, Spanish and Portuguese, and from 1840 to 1843 of St Mary Moorfields. He taught music privately throughout his career. One of his most notable pupils was musicologist and music critic Edward Holmes. He was an original member of the Philharmonic Society, of the Classical Harmonists and of the Choral Harmonists, officiating frequently as conductor, and was a conductor/accompanist at the King's Theatre.
Novello married Mary Sabilla Hehl in 1808. From 1834 they lived at 69 Meard Street, Soho. In 1849 they went to live in Nice for the sake of Mary's health. She died there of cholera in 1854. Novello remained in Nice, where he died in 1861 just before his eightieth birthday.

Musical activities

Many of Novello's original compositions were sacred music, such as the cantata Rosalba, commissioned by the Philharmonic Society and premiered in March 1834. One sacred composition is the tune 'Albano' to the hymn 'Once, only once, and once for all'. A secular example is Old May Morning, which won the Manchester Prize for best cheerful glee in 1832. His great contribution, however, together with Christian Ignatius Latrobe, lay in the introduction to England of unknown compositions by the great masters, such as the Masses written by Haydn and those by Mozart, the works of Palestrina, the manuscripts of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and many other works that are now in the core repertoire.
Novello and his wife Mary held regular musical evenings at his home, attracting a wide range of literary, artistic and musical figures, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Percy Shelley, William Hazlitt, Charles Cowden Clarke, John Keats and his pupil Edward Holmes. The evenings were described by Lamb in his essay ‘A Chapter on Ears’. The young Felix Mendelssohn and the singer Maria Malibran attended later meetings.

Publishing

His first venture into editing and publishing was the Collection of Sacred Music, compiled from manuscripts in use at the Portuguese Chapel, which marks the founding of the publishing firm Novello & Co. There followed Twelve Easy Masses, the Collection of Motets for the Offertory and The Evening Service.
Between 1819 and 1824 Novello also published a series of masses by Haydn and Mozart in the form of vocal scores that were affordable and accessible to choral societies for the first time.
His son Joseph Alfred Novello, who had started as a bass singer, took over as head of the business in 1829 at the early age of nineteen, operating it from 67 Frith Street in Soho. It was Alfred who really established the business, and he is credited with introducing affordable music and of departing from the method of publishing by subscription. From 1841 Henry Littleton assisted him, becoming a partner in 1861, when the firm became Novello & Co., and, on J.A. Novello's retirement in 1866, sole proprietor. Having incorporated the firm of Ewer & Co. in 1867, the title was changed to Novello, Ewer & Co., and still later back to Novello & Co., and, on Henry Littleton's death in 1888, his two sons carried on the business.

The Mozart pilgrimage

In 1829, Mary and Vincent Novello traveled to Austria in hopes of gathering biographical material about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who had died 38 years earlier in Vienna. They had also taken up a collection for Mozart's older sister Maria Anna Mozart, sometimes called today by her childhood name "Nannerl", whom they mistakenly thought to be impoverished. In Salzburg they met with and interviewed Mozart's wife Constanze and her son Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart. They also were able to speak with Maria Anna Mozart, who however by this time had become very old and feeble and would die later that year. The Novellos never wrote the book that they had planned as the result of their project, but their travel diaries were preserved and remain as a useful contribution to Mozart scholarship.

Family

Novello and his wife, Mary Sabilla, had eleven children. Five of his daughters survived to adulthood, four of them gifted singers.