Charles Burney

English scholar and historian

• Born: April 7, 1726
• Birthplace: Shrewsbury, England
• Died: April 12, 1814
• Place of death: Chelsea, London, England

Inspired by the prodigious commentary on music contained in the French Encyclopédie, Burney compiled an informative history of music that gave rise to a distinguished tradition of English musical criticism.

Early Life

Charles Burney was born to a family that was descended from landed gentry in Shropshire. His father, James, was a portrait painter who, upon losing his first wife, married Ann Cooper. Burney had a twin sister, who died young. His parents settled in Chester, but Burney remained in Shrewsbury under the care of a nurse, and it was there that he began musical study with his half brother, James, who served as organist at St. Margaret’s Church from 1735 to 1789. After attending Chester Free School (1739-1742), where he studied under Edmond Baker (organist of Chester Cathedral), Burney returned to Shrewsbury to study French and the violin under Nicholas Matteis.

In 1744, Burney left for London in the company of Thomas Augustine Arne, a noted composer; it was here that Burney made the acquaintance of David Garrick, the actor and theater director, and other luminaries associated with the Covent Garden and Drury Lane Theatres. Besides being active as a music teacher, Burney wrote some of the incidental music for a revival of James Thomson’s masque Alfred (1740). He also contributed to the score of a masque written by Moses Mendez, Robin Hood (1749), and another, titled Queen Mab (1749), by Henry Woodward. A set of sonatas for two violins and bass was published in 1747, and Burney arranged “God Save the Queen” for a performance at Covent Garden.

Burney was an accomplished organist; this led to his appointment at St. Dionis-Backchurch in 1749. He was also enlisted as harpsichordist and conductor at the subscription concerts at the King’s Arms, Cornhill. At this time, Burney married Esther Sleepe; the couple moved to Lynn, Norfolk, to protect Burney’s health when he became consumptive. Their daughter Frances (Fanny), an accomplished writer who contributed to the development of the novel of manners, was born at Lynn in 1752.

Burney’s wife died soon after the family returned, in 1760, to London, where he had a solid reputation as a music teacher and composer of works for the harpsichord. It was at this time that he began his friendship with Samuel Johnson, with whom he had corresponded since 1755. This friendship lasted until Johnson’s death in 1784; according to James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Burney was the recipient of one of Johnson’s last letters. This may have been, in part, because of the great affection Johnson held for Fanny Burney; nevertheless, it is clear from Boswell’s biography that Johnson had enormous respect for Burney’s opinion and enjoyed his company on many occasions, along with that of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Edmund Burke. Boswell referred to Burney as “that ingenious and amiable man”; he was blessed with a lively sense of humor and a fine critical acumen, evidence of which is preserved in A General History of Music (1776-1789), the work for which he is best known.

Life’s Work

Inspired by the numerous commentaries on music found in the pages of the French Encyclopédie (1751-1772), Charles Burney began to contemplate a plan for an extensive history of music, the first of its kind in England. In 1764, Burney was in Paris, where he hoped to enroll his daughters in a school. He was impressed by French opera, and upon returning to London, he adapted, in collaboration with Garrick, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s opera Le Devin du village (1752), which was thus produced in 1766 for the Drury Lane Theatre as The Cunning Man. This production did not match the success attained by Burney’s musical version of Bonnell Thornton’s burlesque Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day (1760), performed at Ranelagh in the same year as the original. The ensuing disappointment deterred Burney from writing for the theater, and so, his curiosity for learning more about trends in continental music criticism undimmed, he turned his attention to gathering material for a projected history of music. Within a few years, he had exhausted whatever primary sources were available in England; for this reason, he planned to embark on a series of “musical tours.”

In 1767, Burney married Mrs. Stephen Allen, a widow with two children. Two years later, the University of Oxford conferred upon him the bachelor’s degree and doctorate in music. The work composed for the doctorate was an anthem with several overtures. It was favorably received and had numerous renditions at the Oxford Music Meetings, and Karl Philipp Emanuel Bach directed a performance of the piece at Hamburg. Burney had been elected to the Royal Society of Arts in 1764 for his musical scholarship related to parish church music and annotated programs for the Anglican service, which had attracted the notice of Charles Wesley. Nine years later, he became a fellow of the Royal Society, partly for disseminating new ideas regarding the history of comets, a lifelong interest about which he eventually wrote an essay (1769) that included translations from the latest French treatises.

In June, 1770, Burney visited France, Switzerland, and Italy to consult libraries, attend concerts, and establish contact with musicians and scholars. He met Voltaire in Geneva and was introduced to Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique (1767; Dictionary of Music, 1779), a copy of which he brought with him when he returned to England. The book proved to be an invaluable resource.

Burney’s first success as a writer came with the publication, in diary form, of The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771). Johnson was so taken with this conceit that he imitated it in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). Burney had been able to assimilate in his journal an extraordinary number of observations regarding musical performances. English readers were fascinated by his descriptions of Venetian street musicians, cello playing (capotasto), and Italian opera, about which he was highly enthusiastic. He examined subjects as diverse as scale harmonizing, placing of the voice (messa di voce), use of the trill, and different ways of applauding.

Elated by this success, Burney studied German and returned to the Continent in July, 1772. In Vienna, he met Christoph Gluck, Metastasio, and Johann Adolf Hasse, among other prominent librettists and composers. K. P. E. Bach performed for him at Hamburg. In later writings, Burney extolled the shaping of orchestral style formulated by Bach and his adherents of the Mannheim school. An account of this tour, entitled The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Provinces, which includes numerous details germane to his interest in music history, was published in two volumes in 1773 to wide acclaim.

With this impetus, Burney issued a prospectus to his publisher regarding a subscription plan for the sale of A General History of Music, of which the first volume appeared in 1776, a few weeks after the publication of Sir John Hawkins’s General History of the Science and Practice of Music. Hawkins was a Middlesex magistrate who had been knighted in 1772. He wrote legal articles and musical texts, and his 1787 biography of Samuel Johnson was superseded only by that by Boswell. He was also an executor of Johnson’s will. With these credentials, he was obviously not flattered when Burney’s A General History of Music eclipsed his own. He accused his rival of being an opportunist, but the popularity of Burney’s work can be attributed partly to the fact that it was sold in installments, whereas the cost of Hawkins’s five-volume set was prohibitive. The two works are best seen as complementary, not competitive. Both represent sound scholarship and range over the entire field of musicology, from antiquity to the late eighteenth century. On the surface, Hawkins’s work seems more theoretical, but it is stultified by a style that is listless and dry. Burney’s history is keenly analytical and gains on second reading; moreover, it is informed with a fluent, kaleidoscopic intelligence and enhanced by an engagingly anecdotal style.

The second volume of A General History of Music was published in 1782; the remaining two volumes appeared seven years later. Because of the unusually long interval between installments, Burney had the advantage of being able to digest and absorb critical opinion regarding the preceding volumes. A General History of Music represents a mine of detailed information, some of it unavailable elsewhere. In the preparation of the first volume, Burney received considerable assistance from the Reverend Thomas Twining, a Greek scholar. In subsequent volumes, Burney’s comments on improvisation (change in cadenza patterns), extemporaneous pieces, pianoforte playing, chamber music, and descant (counterpoint) not only reflect his astute critical perception but also point directly to later developments. Burney’s history revived the reputations of Giovanni Palestrina, Robert White, and Josquin des Prez, composers whose works became standardized in permanent repertoire. Burney called attention to the merits of Johann Sebastian Bach, and in this, he was ahead of his time. He wrote extensively about George Frideric Handel (his account of the Handel Festival of 1784 was published separately), whom he met on several occasions, and about Joseph Haydn, who was not well known in England at that time.

After the great success of the completed A General History of Music, Burney continued to remain a prolific author. In 1789, he began writing for the Monthly Review; his three-volume Memoirs of the Life and Letters of the Abate Metastasio appeared in 1796, and he compiled an unpublished dictionary of music. In 1801, Burney began to contribute music articles to the New Cyclopaedia (1802-1819), compiled by Abraham Rees, for which he received a large honorarium. He was granted a king’s pension in 1806 and became a correspondent of the Institut de France (French Institute) in 1810. He worked on his memoirs until his death on April 12, 1814, the night of the official rejoicing for Napoleon’s first abdication. He was buried in the cemetery at Chelsea College, having served as organist there since 1783. A tablet in his memory was later erected in Westminster Abbey.

Significance

Charles Burney’s compositions are punctilious and pleasant but of no lasting importance. Like many of his contemporaries, however, he recognized the need for a purely English musical idiom, over and against the prevailing Italian style. He admired early music, then called Barocco, and did much to resuscitate an interest in plainsong, madrigals, and fioritura. One weakness of A General History of Music is that it overlooked the large number of English ballad operas based primarily on plots from folk songs.

Burney was the preeminent musicologist of his age. His wide range of interests reflects the humanitarian ideals of the Enlightenment. In the essay on music criticism that introduces volume 3 of A General History of Music, Burney advocated a new mode of critical thinking with regard to established forms and practices. In this way, he represents the eighteenth century cosmopolitan spirit, intricately bound to a system of aesthetic values about music that he codified and expressed.

Bibliography

Brofsky, H. “Dr. Burney and Padre Martini: Writing a General History of Music.” Music Quarterly 65 (July, 1979): 313-345. An informative account of the influence of Martini, a celebrated theorist, teacher, and composer, whom Burney met in Bologna.

Burney, Charles. A General History of Music. Edited by Frank Mercer. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1957. Mercer’s “Critical and Historical Notes” includes excerpts from Burney’s correspondence as well as a biographical portrait.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Letters of Dr. Charles Burney. Edited by Alvaro Ribeiro. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Collection of letters written between 1751 and 1784, providing information about Burney’s life and ideas, including his impressions of contemporary music and his friendships with Samuel Johnson and Sir Joshua Reynolds. Ribeiro has carefully edited and exhaustively annotated these letters, many of which have never before been published.

Kassler, Jamie Croy. “Burney’s ’Sketch of a Plan for a Public Music School.’” Musical Quarterly 58 (April, 1972): 210-234. A description of Burney’s project to institute musical training for children at the London Foundling Hospital, based on observations made in Naples and Vienna. The plan was rejected.

Lonsdale, Roger H. Dr. Charles Burney: A Literary Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Using previously unpublished material, Lonsdale offers a chronicle of Burney’s uphill struggle for recognition. Burney’s profile is that of an “arriviste,” striving to enter the mainstream of the extraordinarily fluid London literary society.

Ribeiro, Alvaro, and James Basker, eds. Tradition in Transition: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth Century Canon. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Collection of essays written in honor of Roger Lonsdale, a Burney biographer. Includes an essay examining the letters of Burney and Hester Thrale, an English writer, diarist, and close friend of Samuel Johnson.

Scholes, Percy A. The Great Doctor Burney: His Life, His Travels, His Works, His Family, and His Friends. New York: Oxford University Press, 1948. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1971. The definitive biography by the author of The Life and Activities of Sir John Hawkins: Musician, Magistrate, and Friend of Johnson (1953). A well-balanced overview of the eighteenth century context.

Woolf, Virginia S. “Dr. Burney’s Evening Party.” In Collected Essays. Vol. 3. London: Hogarth Press, 1966-1967. A marvelous vignette depicting an uproarious concert at no. 1, St. Martin’s Street, with the famous Italian castrato soprano, Pachiarotti, leading the performance.