On the 7^th of this month falls the tercentenary of the birth of the famous music historian, musician and composer, Charles Burney.  To mark it we show the tribute from The Times of 10 April 1926 on the occasion of the bicentenary of his birth:

CHARLES BURNEY.

AN EIGHTEENTH CENTURY MUSICIAN.

To-morrow at the Royal Hospital Chelsea, the Londoners’ Circle will celebrate Dr. Charles Burney, the musician – who was born 200 years ago next Monday.  At the Royal Hospital he was organist from 1783 till his death in 1814, and in the cemetery of the Royal Hospital he lies buried.

The degree of Burney’s merit as performer on the organ or the harpsichord we must take on trust.  “Why don’t you dash away like Burney?” said Johnson to Miss Thrale, after he had first talked slightingly of music and then listened very attentively to her playing.  Johnson, indeed, loved Burney and cared little for music; but there must have been more than “dashing away” in the playing of one who was organist of St. Dionis Backchurch, in Fenchurch-street, and of the Royal Hospital, and who only just missed being made the Master of the King’s Music.  To his compositions, vocal and orchestral, operatic and ecclesiastical, he owes little of his fame, although the great anthem which he composed as the exercise for his degree of Doctor of Music at Oxford was long a favourite in that city and was performed several times in Germany under Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach; and the Londoners’ Group will give several of his pieces to-morrow.  But he had not the nervous strength or the physical health to be a great composer.  His long life was much chequered by bad health and breakdowns.  All the more to his credit, therefore, was the great achievement by which he best served his beloved art of music.  That was his “History of Music,” which he planned while, kept out of London by ill-health, he was organist at King’s Lynn in Norfolk, and completed more than 30 years later, when, in 1789, the fourth volume appeared.  He began with the Hebrews, Egyptians, and ancient Greeks.  He went as far afield as Abyssinia, and he came down to the most Italian of Italian operas of his own time.  He collected assiduously for years the material in print and in manuscript (we find Johnson introducing him to Dr. Edwards, of Oxford, in order that he may see a Welsh manuscript in the Bodleian); and no less assiduously he travelled in France, Germany, Italy, and Austria.  In his great book he laid the foundations of all subsequent English works on the history of music.  And if, in his own day and since, scholars in music have disputed whether his or Sir John Hawkins’s is the better history, the world in general is content to find Hawkins very dull and Burney (though he shockingly neglects both Bach and Handel) very good reading.

He wrote, as men did in those days, in the grand manner; but he wrote well, and about other things than music.  Johnson was not slow to acknowledge that he had one of Burney’s books of travels “in his eye” when he wrote his own “Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.”  And yet not his great History, nor his travel books, nor any other of his writings are the true cause why Dr. Charles Burney is remembered to-day with esteem and with something like affection.  He was the father of Fanny Burney; and that was much, but it was not the secret.  The secret of his immortality is that, for all his nervous affections and his sufferings, he was very lovable; and that his charm, his vivacity, his attractiveness live on in the testimony of those who loved him.  At Chester, whither he has come from his native Shrewsbury to study music, he meets Dr. Arne, and Dr. Arne is so taken with his talent and his charm that he carries him off to London.  Before he has finished his articles as Arne’s pupil, he is bought out by Fuller Greville, who must and will have this delighful young musician in his household, and actually asks him to give the bride away at his wedding.  So Burney is introduced as musician and teacher to the fashionable world, and all the town is captivated by his brilliance and his charm.  Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Garrick welcome him into the Club; the literary ladies of the day love him, and even Horace Walpole makes much of him.  Those evenings in the house (only lately pulled down) in St. Martin’s-street, Leicester-square, which had been Sir Isaac Newton’s house must have been well worth attending, and it is there, or at the Club, and not as a lonely old man, shutting himself up in Chelsea Hospital from a world whence all his friends had gone before him, that Charles Burney is best imagined.

The British Museum holds two annotated copies of ‘A Sunday Concert’ and this is their description of the scene.

Musicians are grouped round a piano. Their names (some misspelt) are written in the margin. The pianist sits in profile to the right looking fixedly at his score; he is Ferdinando Bertoni, a Venetian composer who accompanied his friend Pacchierotti to England. The most prominent of the musicians is Pacchierotti, who stands behind the piano next the pianist, holding open a music book, but smiling at a lady, who sits (right) on a bench among the performers. She is Lady Mary Duncan, whose admiration for Pacchierotti’s singing was the talk of the town, carried to the point of absurdity, and of discourtesy to other singers. (Walpole, ‘Letters’, xii. 141, 3 Jan. 1782, and xv. 16-17, 4 July 1791.) She is the largest figure in the design, out of scale with the other figures. She sits in profile to the right holding up a closed fan, gazing intently at Pacchierotti. Behind her stands the player of the bass, identified as Cariboldi. Seated on the bench next her, on her right hand and wearing spectacles, is a man playing the oboe, identified as Hayford. Seated in a chair in front of Lady Mary and on the pianist’s right hand is the cellist, Cervetto, evidently the younger Cervetto (1747-1837), who played at the professional concerts at the Hanover Square Rooms from 1780. Behind the piano stand (left to right) a violinist, identified as Salpietro, an oboist, J. C. Fischer (1733-1800), who was a great attraction at the Bach-Abel and Vauxhall concerts, and another violinist, Langani or Langoni. To the right of the piano, blowing the French horn, stands Pieltain. In the foreground (right) in profile to the left sits Miss Wilkes on a stool, her hands in a muff, smiling at Dr. Burney, who stands bending towards her, his hands held out. He wears a bag-wig and sword, and appears to be deep in conversation in spite of the singing of Pacchierotti, a fashionable habit much condemned by his daughter Frances, see ‘Cecilia’. Behind Miss Wilkes on the right stands another of the audience, holding his hat under his arm.