Vincent Novello

[1] He was an organist, chorister, conductor and composer, but he is best known for bringing to England many works now considered standards, and with his son he created a major music publishing house.

Novello and his wife Mary held regular musical evenings at his home, attracting a wide range of literary, artistic and musical figures, including Charles and Mary Lamb, Leigh Hunt, Percy Shelley, William Hazlitt, Charles Cowden Clarke, John Keats and his pupil Edward Holmes.

Between 1819 and 1824 Novello also published a series of masses by Haydn and Mozart in the form of vocal scores that were affordable and accessible to choral societies for the first time.

[2] His son Joseph Alfred Novello (1810–1896), who had started as a bass singer, took over as head of the business in 1829 at the early age of nineteen,[10][7] operating it from 67 Frith Street in Soho.

[7] In 1829, Mary and Vincent Novello traveled to Austria in hopes of gathering biographical material about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who had died 38 years earlier in Vienna.

The Novellos never wrote the book that they had planned as the result of their project, but their travel diaries were preserved (published 1955) and remain as a useful contribution to Mozart scholarship.