Despite numerous claims to the contrary in older reference works, Rodwell insisted that his only music teacher had been Henry Rowley Bishop, his most obvious predecessor as a composer for the London theatres.
[2] On the death of his brother James in 1825, Rodwell succeeded to the proprietorship of the Adelphi Theatre; but Frederick Henry Yates with Daniel Terry bought him out very shortly afterwards, at a price of £30,000.
[2] In 1836 Rodwell was appointed director of music at Covent Garden Theatre, where his farce Teddy the Tiler, from the French Pierre ou le Couvreur (Nicolas Brazier and Pierre-Frédéric-Adolphe Carmouche),[4][5] had been performed in 1830.
His principal librettist was Edward Fitzball; but John Baldwin Buckstone, James Kenney, and Richard Brinsley Peake also supplied him with romances, burlettas, operettas, and incidental songs, for musical setting.
Among his publications were:[2] Rodwell composed and arranged the music for the melodrama Jack Sheppard (1839), John Baldwin Buckstone’s dramatization of the novel by William Harrison Ainsworth based on the eponymous real-life character.