Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 41.djvu/248

 volumes of a ‘Selection of Sacred Music as performed at the Royal Portuguese Chapel,’ and was dedicated to the Rev. Victor Fryer (2nd edit. 1825). In this work Novello displayed much judgment, taste, learning, and industry. The expenses of engraving and printing the volumes were defrayed by himself, and this publishing experiment laid the foundation of the great publishing house of Novello & Co.

In 1812, during the time that the Italian Opera Company was performing at the Pantheon, Catalani being prima donna, Novello acted in the dual capacities of pianist and conductor, and in the following year, on the founding of the Philharmonic Society by J. B. Cramer, W. Dance, and P. A. Corri, Novello became one of the thirty original members; he also officiated as pianist for the society, and later as conductor.

Novello was a constant reader of Shakespeare, and there still exists, in the possession of his daughter, Mrs. Cowden-Clarke, the playbill of a private performance of ‘Henry VI,’ in which Novello, described as ‘Mr. Howard,’ played the part of Sir John Falstaff. Many celebrated figures in the worlds of art and letters were constant frequenters of the house in Oxford Street, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Keats, Leigh Hunt, Shelley, Hazlitt, Domenico Dragonetti [q. v.], Charles Cowden-Clarke, John Nyren [q. v.], and Thomas Attwood [q. v.] There is a sonnet written by Leigh Hunt in which Novello, Henry Robertson, and John Gattie are reproved for failing to keep an engagement, and in the chapter on ‘Ears’ in the ‘Essays of Elia’ Lamb has given an amusing description of the meetings at Novello's house. From 1820 to 1823 the Novellos lived at 8 Percy Street, Bedford Square, when they moved to Shacklewell Green, and later to 22 Bedford Street, Covent Garden, subsequently settling at 66 Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn. In or about 1824 Novello was commissioned to examine and report on the collection of musical manuscripts in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, which led to his selection and publication of works by Carissimi, Clari, Buononcini, Leo, Durante, Palestrina, and others. To this library he presented eight volumes of music which had been given to him by his friend Dragonetti prior to his departure for Italy. These volumes contained motets by an anonymous and some by known composers; duos and trios by Stradella, the title-page of which is apparently in the composer's autograph; an oratorio, ‘San Giovanni Battista,’ also by Stradella; and a volume of verse anthems by Purcell, in the handwriting of one Starkey (Oxford, 1783) (Catalogue of Music in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, vols. 177–83, by J. A. Fuller-Maitland and A. H. Mann).

After the festival at York in 1828 Novello was permitted to copy some anthems by Purcell, the original manuscripts of which were in the York Minster Library. These manuscripts were shortly afterwards destroyed by fire, and but for the happy accident of Novello having copied them their contents would have been irretrievably lost.

In 1829 Novello and his wife went to Germany to present a sum of money which had been raised by subscription to Mozart's sister, Mme. Sonnenberg, who was then in very straitened circumstances (cf. Life of Vincent Novello, p. 26). In the same year the Novellos again moved, this time to 67 Frith Street, the house in which Joseph Alfred Novello, their eldest son, commenced business as a music publisher by issuing a continuation of ‘Purcell's Sacred Music,’ begun by Vincent Novello in December 1828. This was completed in seventy-two numbers in October 1832, and ‘was the first collection of music which Vincent Novello had edited for the service of a church outside the pale in which he had been educated’ (cf. Short Hist. of Cheap Music, p. 5). It was followed by a ‘Life of Purcell’ by Vincent Novello. Frequent were the evening réunions at Frith Street of the most celebrated musicians and writers of the day. Among Novello's published compositions is a canon, four in two, written in commemoration of one of these evenings which the composer had passed in the company of Malibran, de Beriot, Willman, Mendelssohn, and others. In 1832 the Manchester prize for the best glee of a cheerful nature was awarded to Novello's ‘Old May Morning,’ the words of which were written by C. Cowden-Clarke. In the same year the Philharmonic Society commissioned Novello to write a work to be produced by them, the result being a cantata, ‘Rosalba,’ for six solo voices, chorus, and orchestra. It was first performed in 1834.

On 2 Jan. 1833 the first meeting of the Choral Harmonists' Society, promoted by Novello from a number of seceders from the City of London Classical Harmonists, was held at the New London Hotel, Blackfriars. Novello was also one of the founders and co-conductor with Griffin of the Classical Harmonists' Society, which met at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand. He was a member of the Royal Society of Musicians, and he played the viola at the Festivals of the Sons of the Clergy at St. Paul's, in the orchestra which the forty youngest members of the society had to supply.