Michael Costa (conductor)

Sir Michael Andrew Angus Costa (14 February 1808 – 29 April 1884) was an Italian-born conductor and composer who achieved success in England.

In his youth, as throughout his life, he wrote a great quantity of music, including operas, symphonies and cantatas, all of which has long since passed into oblivion.

In 1829 he visited the Birmingham Music Festival to conduct Zingarelli's Cantata Sacra, a setting of some verses from Isaiah ch.

Unfortunately both the work and Costa's singing met with ferocious criticism: "[This cantata] is one of the most tame, insipid things we were ever doomed to hear: a heap of common-place trash from the first to the last note.

In the theatre while singing the air "Nel furor delle tempeste", [from Bellini's Il pirata] and accompanying himself, he had a narrow escape.

The tempests proved contagious, and were beginning to manifest themselves in the galleries, and had he remained but a few moments longer on the stage, he would have witnessed a storm compared to which the roarings of his own Vesuvius would have seemed but a murmur.

An aria from Eli, "I will extol thee", was recorded in 1910 by the great British dramatic soprano Agnes Nicholls (1876–1959), and the quality of Costa's music can be judged on various CD re-masterings of this particular disc which have been issued in recent years.

In July 1849 the brothers (in both senses of the word) were Exhalted (Initiated) into the Royal Arch (another branch of Freemasonry) in Fidelity Chapter, No.