Editor’s Note: TBR’d is another new feature I’m inaugurating, featuring books I haven’t read but still want to talk about! (Seems irresponsible.) In my defense, I can generally tell whether I want to read something after sampling a few paragraphs and reading the table of contents. It’s yet another iteration of my philosophy that we overemphasize “classics” at the expense of scores of worthwhile books that don’t get the routine reprint treatment.

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The 18th century English music historian Charles Burney was first introduced to me in the form of a handwritten blurb that appeared opposite the title page of a 1638 edition of George Sandys‘s translation of the psalms I once catalogued: “Psalms put into better verse than they have ever appeared in before or since.” (George Sandys, by the way, is a great poet and fascinating personage, and his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis [e-text from U.Va] is arguably the first great work of American literature, assuming we accept the admittedly tendentious argument that merely being written in America qualifies a work as American.) As you can see by reading the listing, this 1638 edition was one of those wonderful old books that raises more questions than it answers (and it wasn’t like I could interview the seller and  ask about the provenance.) Among those questions were, “Who’s John Wollman?” (unclear, though he must have been someone with an interest in church music or music scholarship in general), and then the next question was, “Who is Charles Burney?”

Charles Burney (1726 – 1814), it turns out, was the greatest English music scholar of his time, an occasional rambler around Europe who was acquainted with Pietro Metastasio, David Garrick, Mozart, Frederick the Great, and Joseph Haydn, and whose musical travelogues attracted the admiration of Samuel Johnson. He was also the father of a whole family of distinguished writers, including the novelists Fanny and Sarah Burney, the explorer James Burney, and the classicist and notable book collector Charles Burney, Junior. The elder Burney’s career began on the London stage circuit where he was a musician and composed pieces for (among other works) James Thomson’s Alfred. His most famous work is his voluminous General History of Music, encyclopedic in scope and eloquent on everything from ancient music to modes of criticism to the latest composers popular in London and on the continent. Late in life, Burney also edited an edition of the letters of the famed librettist Metastasio.

His style is quite readable and far from being mired in obscurity, Burney seems to have consciously written for the purposes of being useful to the general reader and fellow musicians. He notes that during the research phase of the book he consulted “an almost innumerable quantity of old and scarce books on the subject, of which the dulness and pedantry were almost petrific”.

Perhaps the works of his I am most interested in starting out with are his The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771) and The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands and United Provinces (1773). Each is a sort of musical travelogue where Burney travels from city to city and describes the musicians and music establishments in each town, and the books were approvingly cited by Dr. Johnson as an inspiration for the trip chronicled by James Boswell in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.