English firm of music sellers and publishers, active in London from about 1833 to 1849. It published a number of important works, many from plates taken over when the firm succeeded Preston & Son, including many of Handel’s works originally issued by Walsh, Randall and others. Some of these plates were acquired by J. Alfred Novello (see Novello & co.) in 1849, after John Hollier had left the partnership. Charles Coventry was a keen advocate of Bach’s organ works, and among the firm’s original publications was the first English edition of many of the preludes and fugues in 1836, issued jointly with Cramer, Addison & Beale. Because few English organs of the time possessed pedal departments suitable for these works, they were also advertised as performable on the piano, with the pedal part being taken either by a second pianist or by a cello or double bass, for which a separate part, edited by Domenico Dragonetti, was provided. In 1845–6 followed four books of Bach’s chorale preludes, edited by Mendelssohn, whose own six organ sonatas, op.65, were commissioned by Coventry and published in 1845, initially by subscription. The firm also published several of the early works of Sterndale Bennett, who was a close friend of Coventry; Sterndale Bennett’s Sextet, op.8, was dedicated to the publisher. From 1849 to 1851 Charles Coventry continued alone but fell into financial difficulties; at the sale of his trade stock in 1851 Novello purchased another 4780 plates of sacred works, and subsequently reissued from some of them.
Humphries-SmithMP
J.R. Sterndale Bennett: The Life of William Sterndale Bennett (Cambridge, 1907)
P. Ward Jones: ‘Mendelssohn and his English Publishers’, Mendelssohn Studies, ed. R.L. Todd (Cambridge, 1992), 240–55
R. Williamson: William Sterndale Bennett (1816–75) and his Publishers (diss., U. of Nottingham, 1995)
WILLIAM C. SMITH/PETER WARD JONES