Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

Nova Scotia Choral Federation.

Association based in Halifax (ii), Canada, established in 1976.

Novelli, Antonia Maria.

See Laurenti family, (4).

Novello.

English family of musicians and music publishers of Italian origin. They exerted a widespread and stimulating influence on taste and musical practice in 19th-century England.

(1) Vincent Novello

(2) (Joseph) Alfred Novello

(3) Clara (Anastasia) Novello

ROSEMARY HUGHES

Novello

(1) Vincent Novello

(b London, 6 Sept 1781; d Nice, 9 Aug 1861). Organist, choirmaster, conductor, editor, publisher and composer. His father, Giuseppe Novello, a Piedmontese who had settled in London as a pastry-cook, married an English wife, and gave his sons Francis and Vincent the best education he could. Vincent became a choirboy at the Sardinian Embassy chapel, where he received organ lessons from Samuel Webbe. On Webbe's recommendation he was appointed organist, when not yet 17, to the Portuguese Embassy chapel in South Street, Grosvenor Square, where his brother Francis was already principal bass. He held this office for 25 years, and made the chapel famous by his playing and by his choir's regular performances of Haydn's and Mozart's masses, with which he had become acquainted through the friendship and fine musical library of the Rev. C.I. Latrobe. These works had not previously been heard in England, and music lovers from all over London flocked to hear them; a writer of the 1830s even ranked ‘the introduction of the German masses to the Roman Catholic chapels’ with the foundation of the Philharmonic Society as a major influence in what he called ‘the improvement of our national taste’. Novello was a member of the Philharmonic Society from its foundation in 1813, and frequently directed its concerts from the keyboard. He also worked as conductor and accompanist with Angelica Catalani's opera company at the King’s Theatre, and thus acquired, as Mary Cowden Clarke recorded in her memoir of her father, ‘that facility in reading from score, which was, at that time, a rare accomplishment’.

Novello's ventures as editor and publisher began as a modest offshoot of his work as choirmaster. In 1811 he brought out, at his own expense, a two-volume Collection of Sacred Music, compiled from the manuscript music in use at South Street chapel. This was followed by Twelve Easy Masses (which included three of his own) and by further collections of motets. All these he brought within the scope of organists less gifted than himself by providing a written accompaniment instead of the customary figured bass. His series of masses by Haydn and Mozart was also published, as his daughter stated, ‘at his own cost of time and money, in order to introduce them, in accessible form, among his countrymen in England’. The operative words are ‘in accessible form’: hitherto such works had been available, if at all, only in full score. Novello brought them out in vocal score, again with accompaniments arranged by himself for organ or piano, and with separate vocal and orchestral parts, which until then were only to be had by laborious copying. Although several of these masses were later shown to be spurious, it does not detract from the importance of the undertaking. Choral societies were comparatively rare in the first decades of the century, but multiplied rapidly throughout the country as soon as vocal scores and orchestral parts could be obtained easily and cheaply. In London Novello himself took an active part in the affairs of such bodies as the Classical Harmonists and Choral Harmonists, and his own family circle was the proving ground for much music for home and amateur performance.

A request from the Cambridge University Senate that he should examine and report on the great collection of manuscript music bequeathed to the university by Viscount Fitzwilliam in 1816 led to another editorial enterprise, the five-volume collection of Italian church music, mainly of the 17th century, which appeared in 1825 as The Fitzwilliam Music. Between 1826 and 1829 Novello also brought out five volumes of Purcell's sacred music; they included the G minor Evening Service and four anthems, all of which Novello copied in a single day from unpublished manuscripts in York Minster that were destroyed by fire in the following year. Although he was a Roman Catholic, he nevertheless contributed the collection known as the Cathedral Choir Book, several volumes of Boyce's services and anthems, and others by Greene, Croft and Nares to the worship of the Church of England. He also edited Handel's and Haydn's oratorios and produced four-hand arrangements of opera excerpts from Mozart and Spohr.

When news reached London in 1829 that Mozart's sister was ailing and in want, Novello helped to organize a subscription on her behalf and, with his wife, travelled to Salzburg in order to present her with the money and collect material for his projected biography of Mozart, to him ‘the Shakespeare of music’. The book was never written, though his pupil Edward Holmes used the material in his Life of Mozart (1845). The notes and diaries which Vincent and Mary Novello kept on their travels were published in 1955 as A Mozart Pilgrimage. The music of J.S. Bach was Novello's other great love, at a time when Bach's music was known to few in England outside a tiny group of organists (called ‘the Sebastian Squad’ by its moving spirit Samuel Wesley) whose devotion did much to prepare for the later Bach revival.

In 1808 Novello married Mary Sabilla Hehl (b c1789; d Nice, 25 July 1854), a gifted woman of German-Irish descent; through her immense vitality their home became a centre for a wide circle of friends in the literary, artistic and musical worlds. Charles and Mary Lamb, Leigh Hunt and Shelley, Charles Cowden Clarke and his pupils Keats and Edward Holmes were among those who were drawn into such musical evenings as Lamb described in ‘A Chapter on Ears’ (Essays of Elia, 1823); later the young Mendelssohn and the brilliant singer Maria Malibran brought fresh life to these gatherings. Of the 11 children born to Vincent and Mary Novello, apart from those discussed below, Mary (Victoria), who married Charles Cowden Clarke, became famous for her Complete Concordance to Shakespeare (1844–5); Edward Petre, who died at 21, was a painter of real promise (see illustration); Cecilia, actress and singer, married the actor J.T. Serle; and Sabilla achieved some distinction as a singer, teacher, writer and translator.

Novello was frequently asked to design and demonstrate new organs, and was responsible for part of the design of the organ for the new Birmingham Town Hall completed in 1834. For three years, from 1840 to 1843, he was organist at the Roman Catholic chapel in Moorfields, which was then the pro-cathedral for London. In 1848 he moved to Nice for the sake of his wife's health.

Novello

(2) (Joseph) Alfred Novello

(b London, 12 Aug 1810; d Genoa, 16 July 1896). Music publisher, eldest son of (1) Vincent Novello. He was apprenticed in York (as his sister Clara recorded) ‘to learn the music selling business’, and was only 19 when he set up on his own as a music publisher. ‘Alfred’s shop’, as the family called it, was at first only ‘a couple of parlour windows and a glass door’ in their home in Frith Street. But from this modest beginning the great publishing house of Novello & co. developed, as Alfred brought his own practical capacity and business flair to the service of his father's ideals. His acquisition of the copyright of Mendelssohn's St Paul in 1837, an act of personal friendship and regard as well as of musical judgment, contributed enormously to the financial success of his venture. He was a fine bass singer, both as a soloist in oratorio and as a member of the choir of the Roman Catholic chapel at Lincoln's Inn. He also had strong literary and scientific interests and founded two journals, the Musical World (1836; new ser. 1838) and the Musical Times (1844), which from 1853 to 1856 was edited by his sister Mary Cowden Clarke. During her editorship Alfred, who for years had associated himself with the campaign for the repeal of the taxes on newspapers, magazines and advertisements (the so-called ‘taxes on knowledge’), used the periodical to provoke a test case which hastened their eventual repeal. He announced his intention to retire at the end of 1856 and, with the Cowden Clarkes, settled first in Nice and later in Genoa.

Novello

(3) Clara (Anastasia) Novello

(b London, 10 June 1818; d Rome, 12 March 1908). Soprano, fourth daughter of (1) Vincent Novello. Her voice and musical ear were first noticed by her father's pupil Edward Holmes, who began to give her lessons before she was five. In 1829, when she was 11, her parents took her to Paris to compete for a place at the Institution Royale de Musique Classique et Religieuse founded in 1817 by Alexandre Choron. One of the adjudicators who admitted her was Rossini, who became her friend for life. After the Revolution of 1830 she returned home, and became increasingly involved in her father's musical activities; through him she was regularly engaged to sing at the series of Ancient Concerts, and won an enviable reputation for musicianship and reliability. In 1832 she sang the solo soprano part in the first performance in England of Beethoven's Mass in D, given privately at the home of Thomas Alsager. She appeared, for the first time at a Three Choirs Festival, in Worcester in 1833, and in 1834 she was one of the singers chosen to perform at the Royal Musical Festival in Westminster Abbey. After an extended concert tour in Scotland and the north of England, organized by her indefatigable mother, she sang in Birmingham in 1837 in the performance of Mendelssohn's St Paul which marked the inauguration of the new town hall. Mendelssohn then arranged for her to sing at the Gewandhaus concerts in Leipzig during the following winter. This was the beginning of a series of triumphs in the courts and musical centres of Germany.

In 1839 she went to Milan, studied for the operatic stage, and made her début in Pauda in 1841, in the title role of Rossini's Semiramide. When the first Italian performance of his Stabat mater was to be given there in 1841 he chose her as soprano soloist. Later that year, on his advice, she accepted a contract to sing at Fermo, a small city in the papal states. There she met a young aristocrat of an ancient local family, Count Giovanni Baptista Gigliucci, whom she married in 1843. For the first six years of their married life she devoted herself exclusively to her husband and children, and increasingly shared his involvement in the struggle for Italy's independence; in 1849 the collapse of the short-lived liberal resurgence in Rome and the papal states drove them from Fermo into exile. A chance remark of her husband's led to her being offered an operatic contract in Rome, and their precarious circumstances led them to decide that she should resume her professional career in order to provide for the needs of the family. Other operatic engagements followed, but it was only on her return to England in 1851 that, as ‘Madame Clara Novello’, she found her true second career and vocation as an oratorio singer. She appeared regularly at the Three Choirs Festival, sang before royalty at state concerts and at the opening of the re-erected Crystal Palace in 1854 and, in her own words, ‘opened most of the new town halls’ in the developing industrial cities of the north. A certain temperamental reserve had kept her from achieving greatness in opera, but her religious faith, integrity and self-command and the power and purity of her voice gave a unique quality to her singing in oratorio.

Her husband had joined the liberation movement led by the House of Savoy, and the union of the former papal states with Piedmont in 1861 led to their return from exile and Clara's final retirement from professional life. She survived her husband by 15 years. A volume of her reminiscences, much edited from her own rough draft by her daughter Valeria, appeared in 1910.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

M. Cowden Clarke: The Life and Labours of Vincent Novello (London, 1864)

‘Clara Novello’, R.A.M. Magazine Club, no.31 (1910), 19–20

V. Gigliucci, ed.: Clara Novello's Reminiscences (London, 1910)

R.D. Altick: The Cowden Clarkes (London, 1948/R)

A. Mackenzie Grieve: Clara Novello, 1818–1908 (London, 1955/R)

N. Medici di Marignano and R. Hughes, eds.: A Mozart Pilgrimage: Being the Travel Diaries of Vincent and Mary Novello in the Year 1829 (London, 1955/R)

Catalogue of a Portion of the Music Library of Vincent Novello … sold by Puttick & Simpson, intro. by A.H. King, Auction Catalogues of Music, v (Buren, 1975)

M. Hurd: Vincent Novello – and Company (London, 1981)

R. Fawkes: ‘Vincent Novello: Förderer der englischen Kirchenmusik’, Musik und Gottesdienst, xxxvi (1982), 140–42

G. Burchi: ‘Una cadenzi inedita per il soprano nello Stabat Mater di Rossini’, NRMI, xvii (1983), 36–42

J. Dibble: ‘The RCM Novello Library’, MT, cxxiv (1983), 99–101

A.H. King: ‘Vincent Novello and the Mozart Family’, A Mozart Legacy: Aspects of the British Library Collections (London, 1984), 27–34

C. Hatch: ‘The “Cockney” Writers and Mozart's Operas’, OQ, iii/2 (1985), 45–58

M. Hurd: ‘The Novello Archives’, MT, cxxvii (1986), 687–8

P. Weston: ‘Vincent Novello's Autograph Album: Inventory and Commentary’, ML, lxxv (1994), 365–80

C. Banks: ‘From Purcell to Wardour Street: a Brief Account of Music Manuscripts from the Library of Vincent Novello now in the British Library’, The British Library Journal, xxi (1995), 239–58