The monumental project to create a critical edition of the surviving letters of Charles Burney (1726–1814) began several decades ago. In 1991 the first volume, edited by Alvaro Ribeiro, SJ (1947–2013), presented letters that covered a third of a century, starting from the time of Burney’s work at King’s Lynn (The Letters of Dr Charles Burney, volume 1: 1751–1784 (Oxford: Clarendon). The edition was originally conceived as a four-volume set, with Slava Klima intending to carry on the editing after Ribeiro’s first instalment. Following Klima’s death in 1999, Ribeiro resumed work on the letters; he himself died in 2013 (as noted by Peter Sabor in the ‘General Editor’s Preface’, vii). Philip Olleson gave an interim update on the project in this journal in 2016, within his report on a symposium about the Burney family at Cardiff University the previous year:

Olleson gave a listing of the project’s forthcoming issues, detailing the specific chronological periods on which they would focus (volume 2: 1785–1793; volume 3: 1794–1801; volume 4: 1802–1807; and volume 5: 1808–1814).

Since then, however, the timeline for the work has extended beyond what Olleson predicted, and five volumes have been expanded to six, with the temporal frame of each adjusted accordingly. These developments are not surprising, given the vast scope of the project and the detailed research it involves, not to mention the emergence of new sources. Sabor states that Ribeiro originally ‘underestimated the extent of the project’, assuming the survival of ‘some 800 Burney letters’; he comments that ‘there are in fact some 1,100’ (‘General Editor’s Preface’, vii). An updated list of the series’ six volumes is available at the website of the Burney Centre, hosted by McGill University (www.mcgill.ca/burneycentre/publications/current-projects):

Volume 1 (1751–1784), edited by Alvaro Ribeiro, SJ

Volume 2 (1785–1793), edited by Lorna Clark

Volume 3 (1794–1800), edited by Stewart Cooke

Volume 4 (1800–1806), edited by Stewart Cooke

Volume 5 (1807–1809), edited by Nancy Johnson

Volume 6 (1810–1814), edited by Peter Sabor.

Volume 4 was published by Oxford University Press in March 2025 and volume 2 is due for release in September. Their appearance brings the entire series to its two-thirds mark.

The remaining instalments are doubtless awaited with anticipation by all scholars interested in Burney, his intellectual world and his critical outlook, as well as the musical activities and cultural interests of his immediate social milieu and broader network. Further work on Burney’s correspondence is essential for the discovery and analysis of personal insights and material details long hidden from the public gaze. Long-standing precedents and comparisons can already be seen in the letters of the Mozart family (Letters & Documents – DME Mozarteum, https://dme.mozarteum.at/en/letter-documents/ (10 March 2025); Emily Anderson, trans. and ed., The Letters of Mozart & His Family, three volumes (London: Macmillan, 1938)) and more recent work on Muzio Clementi (David Rowland, ed., Clementi Correspondence and Other Documents (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2024)). These and other projects are contributing to what we might describe as the field of ‘epistolary musicology’.

Volume 3, published in 2023, presents 190 letters by Charles Burney, dating from 25 January 1794 to 9 January 1800, edited and with extensive annotations by Stewart Cooke. A stand-alone list of addressees’ names is not given, and it is perhaps useful to tabulate them here, so as to take them in at a single glance:

Biographical information about all known recipients is given in extensive footnote annotations. The index also helpfully gives in boldface the numbers of notes containing the details of their lives, making them easy to spot and locate.

The Introduction by Cooke (xv–xxvi) is essential prior reading for anyone dipping into the volume. It outlines the chronological scope of the letters, the correspondents and the key themes encountered there, as well as embedding all texts in their broader social, political and cultural contexts. Cooke also hints at the sheer scale of correspondence that must have been produced versus the amount that has survived to now. He notes that Burney, in the three months following the death of his second wife Elizabeth Burney (née Allen), burned almost five hundred letters he had written to her, along with ‘an equal number from her’ (xx–xxi). Given that around 1,100 of Burney’s letters survive in total, this numerical comparison – involving a single correspondent – is striking. It makes one wonder how many more letters he wrote in his lifetime and how many more examples may yet emerge. Some of the texts presented here have already been published, for instance by Madame d’Arblay (his daughter Fanny Burney) in her Memoirs of Doctor Burney (for a modern edition see Fanny Burney, Memoirs of Doctor Burney: Arranged from His Own Manuscripts, from Family Papers, and from Personal Recollections by Madame d’Arblay, three volumes (New York: AMS Press, 1975)), but the vast majority appear in print for the first time. Cooke’s meticulous annotations detail the institutional location of originals, and indicate their state (for example, an ‘autograph letter signed’ or ‘autograph note signed’). Entries are also helpfully cross-referenced with the extensive body of literature on or related to the Burney family.

Themes highlighted by the Introduction include the conservative politics of Burney, and his opposition to democracy, as well as his sympathy for the plight of exiled clerics from France (xv–xvi). Burney’s letters detail, among other things, his busy social life, his teaching activities and his major publication project for that period (xvii–xix): Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Abate Metastasio: In which Are Incorporated, Translations of His Principal Letters (three volumes (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1796)). However, as Cooke points out, this period of his life is also marked by personal loss and bereavement, including the deaths of his sister Ann Burney in 1794, his second wife Elizabeth in 1796 (xx–xxi) and his daughter Susanna Elizabeth Phillips (née Burney) in 1800 (xxvi). Burney’s scholarly interests, which had always been mindful of new geographical knowledge and incorporated findings emanating from voyages around the world, take on a cosmological aspect with his turn to astronomy and its history (xxi). In particular, his letters to William Herschel constitute a major feature in this volume (xxii). Burney’s travels around England and his observations on military activities are other aspects of his life that emerge (xxiii).

The front matter includes a highly useful ‘Chronology of Charles Burney’, with significant events – family matters, professional appointments, publications, key junctures in scholarly debates, political moments and broader public affairs – given from 1726 (the year of his birth) to 1832 (Fanny Burney’s publication of her father’s memoirs). Considering the complex family relationships, nicknames and changes of name owing to marriage that are invoked in the letters, one wonders whether a page with a family tree (of at least two generations, his own and that of his children) could be included in future volumes, or as an added detail for an online version. Of course, such a tree would necessarily be distinct from any diagrammatic representation of the extensive network of close friends, less close acquaintances and more distant contacts. An online interface may also provide the requisite tools and create the appropriate environment for the latter.

Regarding the biographical content, a certain reflective approach emerges in some of the letters when Burney muses on his own life. For instance, he relates his earliest musical training to William Mason in a letter of 8 June 1795, mentioning the name of his teacher (‘a Mr Baker, an old org^t of Chester Cathedral, who had been a scholar of D^r Blow’) and remarking that his own father (James MacBurney, 1678–1749) ‘remembered Purcell, Blow, & the principal organists of their time’ (97). A poignant episode is his trip to his birthplace and place of earliest schooling, recounted in letters to Fanny and Charles junior (239–248, 251; he later mentions this also to Thomas Twining, 300). Burney writes in October 1797 what he terms a ‘Confessional’ to an unnamed recipient, regarding his earliest attempts at composition and publication (282–286). The total picture that emerges is of a prodigious and productive working life, in scholarship, teaching and public engagement. His work ethic at what would today be considered retirement age seems relentless. Burney wrote in a letter to Fanny in late July 1797 that ‘life is too short for a poor tottering septagenaire man to talk of half the matters that I have to do’, going on to list the subjects in which he had already worked: ‘the study of music, general literature, musical Hist^y, Biography, & astronomy’ (237).

Burney’s conservative political perspectives are broadly detectable from his published work, with his attitudes reflecting his standing in aristocratic circles and his position in the late eighteenth-century British musical and social ‘establishment’. Yet his personal letters give the reader his most direct and unfiltered views. For instance, he writes in mid-1794 to Frances Anne Crewe that M. le Comte de Mongaillard’s report on the state of France in May 1794 ‘will make you melancholy . . . The facts he relates, and events he predicts are truly deplorable, not only to the Martyrs of revolution, but to all civilized Nations’ (37). In August that year he took tea with the exiled Bishop of Troyes (Louis-Mathias Barral) and reported to the same correspondent on that prelate’s apparent lack of hope for ‘a revolution favourable to monarchy’ (44). He also mentions the imminent return from China of Lord Macartney (45), who in the years 1792 to 1794 led the well-known British embassy there (he had been accompanied there by Crewe’s son John; see 51, note 373). Sometime before 20 October he dined with Lord Macartney himself and the Duke of Newcastle, and wrote that ‘they seem in no better spirits than myself ab^t politics’ (59). In mid-1795 he mentions ‘some poor miserable Engl. Nuns lately come from Holland’, whom the editor identifies as ‘The Poor Clares of Gravelines, who had been imprisoned for eighteen months’ (115; editor’s comment in note 756). Two years later, he writes to Fanny that ‘the whole world wears a face of Revolution!’ (228). After having visited in late 1797 Dr Robert Waring Darwin (1766–1848) and his wife Susannah Darwin (née Wedgwood, 1765–1817) – the future parents of Charles Darwin (1809–1882) – he remarked that ‘they are intelligent clever people – I w^d they were not presbiterians, and Democrats!’ (301). In early February 1799 Burney wrote in a letter to Christian Ignatius Latrobe of the ‘Marsellois [sic] with words by the D—l [Devil] himself’ (381).

Musicologists inspired by the ‘global turn’ in the discipline will be interested to note the extra-European themes that come periodically into the correspondence. On 10 June 1794 Burney writes to his daughter Fanny that Frederic North ‘invited me when he was here to meet the Turkish Ambassador [Yusuf Agyak Efendi (1744–c1823)] & his secretaries at his Mother’s L^y Guilford’s where he lives, to hear Turkish Music. It was very curious & as wild & savage as I expected’ (26). Whilst a private comment, this seems a relatively rare mention of Turkish music – as distinct from exoticist musical evocations of turquerie – in his writings. (There is a fleeting reference to ‘the religious dance of the dervises [sic]’ in his General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, four volumes, volume 1 (London: author, 1776), 347; see also a brief mention of Turkish melodies, citing Giovanni Battista Donado, in volume 2 (London: author, 1782), 553). His characterization of it as ‘curious’, ‘wild’ and ‘savage’ – as opposed to ‘barbarous’ or ‘civilized’ – seems to reveal a negative attitude towards the artform, perhaps in line with his views on other aspects of Turkish culture (see, for example, his comment on Turkish religion in A General History of Music, volume 1, 149–150). His choice of wording regarding his expectations suggests that this occasion was the first time he had heard Turkish music, although further research may throw new light on the matter.

On 12 July 1796 he thanked Joseph Cooper Walker ‘for your hints concerning the Music of Africa’. However, he expressed his ‘fear [that] I shall have no impulse for augmenting the contents or number of my 4 4^to Vol^s on musical history already published, while the arts of peace are so totally superseded for those of war, anarchy, & devastation!’, lamenting Napoleon’s recent campaigns in Italy (150). A few months later (13 October 1796) he commented to Joseph Cooper Walker:

Burney’s clear desire for a published scholarly work on music to ‘break even’ financially perhaps foreshadows musicological concerns of later times (including our own). Yet it is worth noting that his plans for a history of ‘national music[s]’ did not evaporate completely; in his article on ‘Chinese music’ for The Cyclopaedia; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and Literature, edited by Abraham Rees (thirty-nine volumes, volume 7 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1819), no pagination), he mentions that these materials had been gathered for a work with the title ‘General History of Music in every civilized part of the Globe’. Forthcoming volumes in this edition of Burney’s letters will hopefully shed more light on that never-to-be-completed project. In fact, Maria Semi has already discussed relevant quotations from letters in the time-periods covered by volumes 2 and 4 in her article ‘Writing about Polyphony, Talking about Civilization’ (72).

Events in the wider world without direct musical import also formed part of Burney’s discussions. In early 1796 he commented to Richard Cox (1718–1803, a banker and agent for the army; see 38, note 262), with a clear sense of patriotism, on the East India Company’s seizure of Dutch colonies in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) ‘almost without the loss of a Man!’, noting that he had studied a map of the island in detail and that the fortified city of Trincomalee (on Sri Lanka’s north-east coast) had ‘long been thought the most important & impr[e]gnable of all the Dutch oriential Possessions’ (126). It is also intriguing – but not surprising – to read Burney’s comment in 1797 about having seen live kangaroos in London (258). Burney’s local powers of observation and tendency to write about domestic or international matters that piqued his interest mirror what Nicholas Mathew has noted of Haydn’s attention to detail in his English travels of the same decade (‘Interesting Haydn: On Attention’s Materials’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 71/3 (2018), 655–701).

As already noted, the embassy led by Lord Macartney that had set out for China in 1792 returned to Britain in 1794. Burney had organized musicians and provided musical materials for this mission, the musical and sonic dimensions of which – especially its political, philosophical and aesthetic ramifications – have been examined in detail by Joyce Lindorff and Thomas Irvine (Joyce Lindorff, ‘Burney, Macartney and the Qianlong Emperor: The Role of Music in the British Embassy to China, 1792–1794’, Early Music 40/3 (2012), 441–453; Thomas Irvine, Listening to China: Sound and the Sino-Western Encounter, 1770–1839 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), especially 109–138). In the present volume, we find multiple mentions of Macartney and members of his retinue, with the editor’s extensive annotations providing valuable data, context and links. There is an intriguing reference to a missing letter from Burney to Cox, from mid-September 1794, in which Burney must have related his discussions with Macartney. This information can be divined from a reply received from Cox, who writes that his correspondent must ‘practise on the musical Instruments he [Macartney] has presented you with, and give me a Chinese tune on my entrance into your mansion’ (59, note 410). In subsequent years several of the members of the embassy that Lord Macartney led to China produced published accounts of their travels. On 15 September 1797 Burney wrote to his daughter Charlotte: ‘Tell Hetty [Esther, Charlotte’s elder sister] her honest sposo [Charles Rousseau Burney] drank tea w^th us last night, and divarted [sic] himself over the prints of the Chinese Voyage till past 9’ (260).

As mentioned above, astronomy is another major topic of the letters in this period. At the urging of Fanny, Burney had in 1797 resumed a history in verse of astronomical endeavours, in twelve books (214–215, 305–307; see also xxi). He met astronomer and musician William Herschel (1738–1822), engaged in correspondence with him and visited his house, and Herschel reciprocated. (For a discussion of recent musicological research on this famous figure see Rachel Cowgill’s and Sarah Waltz’s report on the conference ‘Cosmic Harmonies: A Symposium Celebrating the Life, Science, Music, and Legacy of William Herschel (1738–1822)’, held at the University of York on 19 June 2022, in Eighteenth-Century Music 20/1 (2023), 122–124.) Burney’s letters to Herschel demonstrate his genuine enthusiasm for astronomy; his descriptions of Herschel to family members exhibit the esteem in which he held the scientist (see, for example, 267).

This volume is a major achievement and will doubtless be a welcome addition to every reference library with collections relating to eighteenth-century Europe. From a practical point of view, it is worth asking whether the full series of letters will eventually be digitized and searchable, along the lines of the Digitale Mozart-Edition Briefe und Dokumente. Amongst the many advantages of that option, such an interface would allow for the integration of any newly discovered correspondence. In the meantime, individual scholars would no doubt gain much from having this book on their shelves. The present volume, containing some 640 pages, is published in hardcover and priced at a rather hefty £190 or US$245. An e-book is also available, via e-book providers. If a paperback version is eventually published, it would have the added value of being affordable for individuals and (if with decent margins) being able to be more easily propped open for reference.

As mentioned earlier, 2025 sees the publication of the second and fourth volumes of letters. This year thus marks a significant milestone in Burney research and in the critical analysis of his private written output. Scholars from multiple disciplines who are interested in the vistas opened up by this correspondence will no doubt look forward with fascination to the remaining instalments in this impressive critical edition.