Michael Costa: England’s First Conductor: The Revolution in Musical Performance in England, 1830–1880 by John Goulden (review)

The period covered by John Goulden’s Michael Costa: England’s First Conductor: The Revolution in Musical Performance in England, 1830–1880 has always been treated as a low point in English musical history. Where are the names to compare with Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Verdi, or Wagner? The question itself reveals how easily a whole culture tends to be judged by a few great names. This is especially true in music, where familiarity with the products of a period depends on their repeated selection for performance.

What was really great about the early Victorian age in music was something that we cannot experience today: the transformation of performance. It has taken an American professor and a retired ambassador to Turkey to show the ways in which an Italian conductor raised English ensemble music to a level where it could compete on equal terms with the rest of Europe. Over the last two decades, Bennett Zon, professor of music at Durham University, has provided much of the energy and leadership behind an extraordinary burst of interest in Victorian music-making. Coming from the United States, he was entirely free of the Land ohne Musik complex that British musicologists have found hard to escape, whether they accept, reject, or profess to ignore it. He has published four monographs and many articles on aspects of Victorian music, edited two series with Ashgate and Routledge, and edited several other books, which have covered a vast range of topics and essentially opened up what was an almost forgotten or completely misunderstood period of English musical history.

Goulden is one of Zon’s doctoral students. After retiring from a distinguished diplomatic career in 2000, Goulden began research on Michael Costa, completing his dissertation in 2012; this book is the result. As an outsider in a different sense from Zon, he has an admirably fair and detached point of view, giving Costa his due, but never praising him beyond what is justified by facts or by the opinions of those who actually witnessed what was happening. The evidence he cites comes from an extraordinarily wide range of archival sources, letters, diaries, and pictorial illustrations, and his treatment surely benefits from his having gained a first in history at Oxford.

The early nineteenth century was the time of gradual transition from direction of orchestras from a keyboard instrument to baton conducting as we understand it today. There was a wide range of practices throughout Europe, which Goulden explores in detail before he shows why the inconsistencies were even greater in England. Not only was there a persistent division of control between the violinist leader and the surviving keyboard player, but there was often a third competitor called the musical director or maestro. Ignaz Moscheles, on his arrival in London in 1821, asked Muzio Clementi, “What do they mean by the term conductor?” and François-Joseph Fétis in 1829 reported that “The opinion of the writers on the continent . . . places the English at the lowest level of the scale of musical facilities” (Clementi qtd. in Goulden 46, Fétis qtd. in Goulden 47). This was the situation that Costa encountered when he arrived in London in late 1829. The conditions at the King’s Theatre were almost unbelievably bad.

Costa himself—another outsider—made a poor start in Birmingham, and was up against a number of prejudices enumerated by Goulden. He decided, nevertheless, to adopt British nationality. The amazing part of the story is that in less than ten years, by sheer force of character, he had overcome all his disadvantages and risen to a commanding position at the top of the scale in the directing of English opera. He began as a maestro al cembalo and did not fully adopt the baton until 1835. More significantly, he concerned himself with matters that had previously been left in...