Memoirs Of Dr Charles Burney 1726 1769

Charles Burney (1726-1814) was one of the foremost music historians of the Enlightenment, a friend of David Garrick, correspondent of Diderot and Rousseau, a champion of Haydn, and a member of the Royal Society. The frequency with which he is still quoted by musicologists and historians attests to the continuing relevance and importance of his work. After completing his monumental General History of Music (1776-89), Burney began to write a projected twelve-volume autobiography, a taska he abandoned in 1805. When he died nearly a decade later, his daughter, the novelist Fanny Burney, edited the manuscript but destroyed much of it before publishing her own bowdlerized Memoirs of Dr. Burney in 1832. Not until the 1950s did fragments of the original memoirs, long believed lost, come to light. This edition reconstructs the fragments from Burney's first volume, free of Fanny Burney's interpolations and alterations. The resulting text is here published for the first time. The restored and uncensored Memoirs of Dr. Charles Burney covers his life from 1726 to 1769, illuminating his early career and the musical and theatrical life of London and the provinces in the mid-eighteenth century. The editors have skillfully bridged the fragments with material from other sources, including Burney's later letters. Their annotations, drawn in part from the articles on music that Burney wrote while he was working on his memoirs, reveal many new details about his world.

Charles Burney (1726-1814) was one of the foremost music historians of the Enlightenment, a friend of David Garrick, correspondent of Diderot and Rousseau, a champion of Haydn, and a member of the Royal Society. The frequency with which he is still quoted by musicologists and historians attests to the continuing relevance and importance of his work. After completing his monumental General History of Music (1776-89), Burney began to write a projected twelve-volume autobiography, a taska he abandoned in 1805. When he died nearly a decade later, his daughter, the novelist Fanny Burney, edited the manuscript but destroyed much of it before publishing her own bowdlerized Memoirs of Dr. Burney in 1832. Not until the 1950s did fragments of the original memoirs, long believed lost, come to light. This edition reconstructs the fragments from Burney's first volume, free of Fanny Burney's interpolations and alterations. The resulting text is here published for the first time. The restored and uncensored Memoirs of Dr. Charles Burney covers his life from 1726 to 1769, illuminating his early career and the musical and theatrical life of London and the provinces in the mid-eighteenth century. The editors have skillfully bridged the fragments with material from other sources, including Burney's later letters. Their annotations, drawn in part from the articles on music that Burney wrote while he was working on his memoirs, reveal many new details about his world.

Frances Burney (1752–1840) was the most successful female novelist of the eighteenth century. Her first novel Evelina was a publishing sensation; her follow-up novels Cecilia and Camilla were regarded as among the best fiction of the time and were much admired by Jane Austen. Burney's life was equally remarkable: a protegee of Samuel Johnson, lady-in-waiting at the court of George III, later wife of an emigre aristocrat and stranded in France during the Napoleonic Wars, she lived on into the reign of Queen Victoria. Her journals and letters are now widely read as a rich source of information about the Court, social conditions and cultural changes over her long lifetime. This Companion is the first volume to cover all her works, including her novels, plays, journals and letters, in a comprehensive and accessible way. It also includes discussion of her critical reputation, and a guide to further reading.

Presents material not included in either The early journals and letters of Fanny Burney (covering 1768-1781) or The court journals and letters of Frances Burney (covering 1786-1791), written at the height of her fame as a novelist.

This volume of letters by Charles Burney, the first to be published since 1991, runs from 1794 to 10 January 1800, beginning with his recovery from a debilitating attack of rheumatism, continuing with the death of his wife in 1796, and ending with the shocking death of his daughter Susanna. Certain leitmotifs, typical of Burney's concerns, stand out throughout the volume: his trepidation over the war with France and its effect on domestic politics, his exhausting social life, his travels, and his publication of the memoirs of the poet and lyricist Metastasio. A staunch monarchist and a self-confessed 'allarmist', Burney is haunted 'day and night' by the French Revolution and the threat that Republican France poses to 'religion, morals, liberty, property, & life'. He frets frequently over those he considers to be domestic Jacobins, a word he uses forty-seven times in the course of the volume to describe anyone whose politics differ from his own conservative values. Although Burney turns sixty-eight in April 1794, in this volume he barely slows down his habitual hectic pace of teaching and publishing. In the summer of 1795, he publishes his final book, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Pietro Metastasio, despite a hectic social life that sees him hobnobbing with the elite in society and politics and a love of travel that takes him to the homes of friends in Hampshire and Cheshire and into his past on a nostalgic visit to Shrewsbury, his childhood home.

In 1714, king George I ushered in a remarkable 123-year period of energy that changed the face of Britain and ultimately had a profound effect on the modern era. The pioneers of modern capitalism, industry, democracy, literature, and even architecture flourished during this time and their innovations and influence spread throughout the British empire, including the United States. Now this rich cultural period in Britain is effectively surveyed and summarized for quick reference in a first-of-its-kind encyclopedia, which contains entries by British, Canadian, American, and Australian scholars specializing in everything from finance and the fine arts to politics and patent law. More than 380 illustrations, mostly rare engravings, enhance the coverage, which runs the whole gamut of political, economic, literary, intellectual, artistic, commercial, and social life, and spotlights some 600 prominent individuals and families.

This book surveys the role of music in British culture throughout the long Romantic period.