The Great Dr Burney

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1052, 23 October 1959, Page 12

The Great Dr Burney

DR BURNEY’S MUSICAL TOURS IN EUROPE, edited by Percy A. Scholes; 2 vols, Oxford University — Enflish price . £5/5/-.

(Reviewed by

J.C.

B.

HAT an astonishing family were the Burneys, with their assortment of talents! -Fanny the novelist, the diarist; James the sailor, who went out with Cook; Charles the scholar; harpsichordists, minor artists, vivid letter-writers-but at once we are off on the entrancing ways of irrelevance that open.before all writers on any Burney. The Burney now before us is Dr Charles, the Great Dr Burney, the Progenitor, the familiar of Johnson and Garrick and Lord Sandwich and Mrs Thrale and-irrelevance yawns again. This is Dr Burney the musician, practising, critical, pedagogical, who wrote that General History of Music in four considerable quarto volumes, which appeared from 1776 to 1789 and has instructed us ever since; the Burney to whom the encyclopaedic Dr Scholes gave the same loving care his hero extended to the whole field of harmony. Dr Burney was not content to be a "mere" historian, a man of the library and the written record; his field being that of harmony (and also, it is true, of counterpoint, and the instruments of the Greeks and Romans, and the mechanics of ancient organs, and plainsong. and notation) he was a strong believer in the preliminary puff, the trailer, the discreet self-advertisement. And-there can be no doubt about ithe was a charming, knowledgeable, universally interested, self-sacrificing, and very determined man. How else could he have put up with the fearful travelling conditions of 18th century Italy and Germany, doing it (for he was not rich) on the cheap-put up with the shocking roads, the dizzy mountainpasses, the bug-ridden inns, the voracity of innkeepers, torrential rains, shortness of food, insolence of officials? That, certainly, was only one side of it: Dr Burney had an eye for natural beauty as well as his letters of introduction, he had the Plan of his history, he had his facility in languages, he had his charm: he passed from town to town meeting all the right people, singers, composers, players on instruments, librarians, dilettanti and cognoscenti grand-dukes and archdukes, poets and peasants, ambassadors and artists. He met archbishops, and he met Voltaire, he met Padre Martini and two or three Scarlattis and Farinelli and Jommelli and Piranesi and Hasse and the chevalier Gluck and the Emperor and Metastasio and C. P. E. Bach and Rousseau and-in fact he met everybody, heard Frederick the Great play the flute, visited innumerable operas and church-services and museums and libraries and art galleries, bought books, manuscripts, drawings and was presented with many more, made incessant notes, wrote away at his journal-did enough, in fact, to lay a modern traveller with all the advantages of cars and planes and Wagon-lits, flat on his back a dozen times with sheer exhaustion. Of course Dr Burney had a mission, a consuming passion. He was collecting material for his great History, he. was pumping everybody hard; in the cause he was prepared to listen even to the

French operas, the detestable howling of French singers, he would take the outTageous as well as the elegant, the dull with the spirited. How could anyone stand up to the quantity of music he stood up to? He was a conscientious man. He had a wonderful gift for observation, a good memory; his devotion to exact detail could make him tedious, but he could also write exceedingly well. He wroté, as preliminaries to his History, The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771) and The *Present State of Music in Germany (1773). From the first he excluded, on the advice of friends, all his miscellaneous travel observations, a rich harvest more welcome to us now than the names of half a hundred minor Italian musicians. Fortunately he left manuscripts. Dr Scholes put the whole thing together, edited it with accomplished learning, and here we have an 18th century panorama that should delight any reader who will skip a bit, who can afford to buy it, is able'to borrow it from the library, or can scrounge a review copy. For as Burney said, "Though I love music very well, yet I love humanity better." In Italy, of course, it was difficult to distinguish between the two.