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  • Vincent Novello (1781-1861): Music for the Masses
  • Charles Edward McGuire
Vincent Novello (1781-1861): Music for the Masses. By Fiona M. Palmer. pp. xxii + 242. Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain. (Ashgate: Aldershot and Burlington, Vt., 2006, £45. ISBN 0-7546-3495-7.)

Musicians, theorists, and musicologists not familiar with the history of music in nineteenth-century Britain will no doubt recognize the name Novello largely because of the Victorian publishing firm of the same name, run initially by J. Alfred Novello, son of the subject of this study. Throughout the nineteenth century, the firm was synonymous with British music performance, as it promoted new music at provincial festivals through commissions of key works in the repertory (including Edward Elgar's well-known oratorio The Dream of Gerontius as well as dozens of other works), news about music and musicians in Britain and around the world through its house magazine, the Musical Times and Sight-Singing Circular, and as the supplier of cheap copies of warhorse works such as Handel's Messiah, Bach's St. Matthew Passion, and Mendelssohn's Elijah, still extant for sale in used book shops and to be found in larger choir libraries. Studies of various parts of this publishing empire include Percy Scholes's popular miscellany The Mirror of Music, 1844-1944: A Century of the Musical Life of Britain as Reflected in the Pages of the Musical Times (London, 1947) and Victoria Cooper's recent monograph based on her doctoral thesis The House of Novello (Aldershot, 2003). The family also produced a famous singer, Clara Novello, and an important author and critic, Mary Cowden Clarke.

Vincent Novello, propagator of this family and its decades-powerful publishing empire, was by all accounts a typical nineteenth-century musician. Throughout his life, he created music in a variety of ways: as a keyboard performer, a composer and arranger, an editor of music, an author, and an occasional impresario. Fiona Palmer's monograph takes the long view of this individual throughout his life, and proclaims that his most important contribution to nineteenth-century British society was his ceaseless promotion of music of high quality, including that of Mozart and Mendelssohn, in an attempt to raise the tastes of the English public.

I referred to Palmer's work in the preceding paragraph as a monograph and study and not a biography. Palmer herself tells the reader at the beginning of her book that her work is the 'first attempt to provide a more rounded view of [Vincent Novello's] life and career' (p. 2), and divides her volume into two large sections entitled 'The Man'and 'The Career'.While this would seem to indicate a typical life-and-works discussion, in reality the limited biographical section is only about a third of the book and serves mainly as a contextual skeleton for the discussion of Novello's various intersections with nineteenth-century music and culture. Consequently, parts of the biography are much more detailed than others: Palmer delves at length, for instance, into his formative musical training as an organist at London Catholic embassy chapels, but does not provide more than a mere mention of his declining retirement years in Nice. To understand her study fully, one needs to be familiar with the biography of Novello to a certain extent. Given that the only thorough biography remains the largely hagiographic study by Novello's daughter, Mary Cowden Clarke (The Lifeand Labours of Vincent Novello (London, 1864))—which was largely excerpted in the Musical Times in the early1860s—and that this biography is not widely available in its full form, a complete contextual biography of Novello is still necessary.

Instead, Palmer's monograph seems more like a set of extremely detailed notes on its way towards becoming a biography. Besides a weightier discussion of Novello's life, what the volume lacks is continuity. The first section, while presaging [End Page 634] elements of the second, feels largely detached from it. The four chapters in the second section continually refer to the same individuals and even the same circumstances, but do not interrelate easily. Consequently, it reads like a set of bulked-up conference papers, duplicating similar phrases and...

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