Michael Costa (conductor)

Sir Michael Andrew Angus Costa (14 February 180829 April 1884) was an Italian-born conductor and composer who achieved success in England. Biography He was born as Michele Andrea Agniello Costa in Naples, into a family of Sephardic Jewish descent. He studied there with his father, at the Real Collegio di Musica, and later with Niccolò Antonio Zingarelli. In his youth, as throughout his life, he wrote a great quantity of music, including operas, symphonies and cantatas, all of which have 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. xii. This was the occasion of his memorably inauspicious début. The intention was that Costa should rehearse and conduct the work, but J. B Cramer and Thomas Greatorex elbowed him out and was instead engaged as a tenor soloist in another concert. 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 commonplace trash from the first to the last note. After twaddling in B flat for half an hour, he ventures for a few bars int