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...Operas. (Music Nineteenth-Century Britain.) Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate. 2003. Pp. xix, 256. $84.95. ISBN 0-7546-0558-2.

These two volumes suggest important questions about music in early nineteenth-century Britain: How did the new repertory of "classical" music develop a base in the publishing industry? How could an Irish-born composer make a big name in opera? Did the musical worlds treated by the two books have anything to do with each other?

The answer to the final question is no--by the middle of the nineteenth century musical life had begun fragmenting into separate worlds of taste and performance. We hear almost nothing about opera, least of all Michael William Balfe, in the history of the House of Novello, the main British firm that published scores of classical music, in large part sacred works. It formed part of a movement I call "musical idealism," the effort to build a higher world of serious taste apart from the rapidly expanding industry that sold amateurs editions of piano medleys upon popular operas. Balfe made a name far more widely and more positively than is often realized, though he seems not to have profited from the new musical capitalism.

Victoria L. Cooper contributes the first study of the firm in some time....

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