Charles Burney

Charles Burney travelled Europe interviewing musicians in order to write a history of music, and is now read mostly for the travel journals rather than the history. He was born in Shrewsbury, apprenticed to the composer Thomas Arne in London, and bought out of his indentures by a wealthy patron who took him to Norfolk; he worked as an organist at King's Lynn and then built a large practice in London as a fashionable music teacher. He took a doctorate at Oxford in 1769. For the history he made two long research journeys, through France and Italy in 1770 and through the Low Countries, Germany and Austria in 1772, meeting Padre Martini, Farinelli, Gluck, Hasse and the young Mozart's father, and published the tours as books that are still the best account of what European music actually sounded like to a listener of the period. The General History of Music appeared in four volumes between 1776 and 1789, the first volume in the same year as John Hawkins's rival history, which Burney's circle mocked out of circulation with a squib sung to a popular tune. He was a friend of Johnson, Reynolds and Burke, and a member of the Literary Club. His daughter Frances published Evelina anonymously in 1778 and became a better writer than her father, which he took some time to accept; his son James sailed with Cook. He was made organist of Chelsea Hospital and died there. He wrote the music articles for Abraham Rees's Cyclopaedia in his old age, a very large body of work he was never properly paid for. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1773. He had eight surviving children by two marriages, and the household is documented in more detail than almost any other of the period because so many of them kept diaries. Haydn stayed with him in London.

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