Charles Burney
Charles Burney was born at Raven Street, Shrewsbury, the fourth of six children of James Macburney (1678–1749), a musician, dancer and portrait painter, and his second wife Ann (née Cooper, c. 1690–1775).
In 1766 he produced, at Drury Lane, a translation and adaptation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's opera Le Devin du village, under the title of The Cunning Man.
As vividly recorded by Fanny, the family moved in a lively cultural circle in London, which included the portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the composers Harriet Wainwright and Joseph Haydn, the essayist Edmund Burke and the MP for Southwark Henry Thrale, whose wife Hester Thrale was a close friend of Fanny's.
The University of Oxford honoured Burney, on 23 June 1769, with the degrees of Bachelor and Doctor of Music, and his own work was performed.
He left London in June 1770, carrying numerous letters of introduction, and travelled to Paris, Geneva, Turin, Milan, Padua, Venice, Bologna (where he met Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his father), Florence, Rome and Naples.
In July 1772 Burney again visited the continent to do further research, and on his return to London published an account of his tour under the title The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces (1773).
The fourth volume covers the birth and development of opera and the musical scene in England in Burney's time.
The Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients, in the first volume of Burney's History, was translated into German by Johann Joachim Eschenburg, and printed at Leipzig, 1781.
In 1779 he wrote for the Royal Society an account of the young William Crotch, whose remarkable musical talent excited so much attention at that time.
In 1784 he published, with an Italian title page, the music annually performed in the Pope's chapel at Rome during Passion Week.
Towards the close of his life Burney was paid £1000 for contributing to Rees's Cyclopædia all the musical articles not belonging to the department of natural philosophy and mathematics.
[8] The latter were written by John Farey, Sr and Jr. Burney's contribution to Rees included much new material which had not appeared in his earlier writings, particularly about the London music scene then.
His admiration for Handel greatly influenced Haydn's decision to focus on oratorio upon his return to Vienna, which would eventually result in the composition of The Creation.
At one time he thought of writing a life of his friend Samuel Johnson, but retired before the crowd of biographers who rushed into that field.
Charles Burney, a major donor of books to the British Museum, and his second daughter was Frances or Fanny, the novelist, later Madame D'Arblay.
Her published diary and letters contain many minute and interesting particulars of her father's public and private life, and of his friends and contemporaries, including his initial opposition to her marriage to the French refugee Alexandre D'Arblay in 1793 and to her sister Charlotte's remarriage to the pamphleteer and stock jobber Ralph Broome in 1798.
The Letters of Dr Charles Burney (1751–1814) General Editor: Peter Sabor A scholarly edition of the Letters of Dr Charles Burney is being published in six volumes by Oxford University Press: This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed.
