By the time that Charles Burney was preparing his entry on Mozart for Rees's Cyclopædia in 1805, he had become an unqualified admirer of the composer's writing for voice. In a letter to Christian Ignaz Latrobe dated 24 March 1805, he asked about a score of the Requiem, as he was reluctant to part with the one on loan to him: ‘Have you ever a disposable copy of Mozart's Requiem? I have Salomon's copy in my possession now; but hate to part with it till I have another.’Footnote ¹ Five years after the publication of the full score by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1800, copies were evidently still not plentiful in London, even if the work's stature was increasingly acknowledged by cognoscenti.Footnote ² When Burney contacted William Crotch to ask if he had any information on Haydn's stage works, he explained why it had taken him so long to appreciate the universality of Mozart's achievement: his ‘vocal music is exquisite – but we never knew that he had ever composed a drama, or even a Song till after his death’.Footnote ³ That the English were ‘wholly unacquainted’ with Mozart's operas and songs whilst he was alive was untrue, yet it served as a convenient excuse for the historian, neatly absolving him from the accusation that he had been guilty of a serious lapse in judgment. The documentary record of his knowledge of the composer, however, tells a different story.

As an acknowledged expert on musical prodigies, Burney contributed to a ‘scientific’ evaluation of Mozart, undertaken in 1765 during the final weeks of his stay in London. A coterie of investigators on the fringes of the Royal Society concluded that the boy was a phenomenon worthy of serious testing, rather than being subjected to circus-style party tricks with an obscured keyboard. His ability to extemporize fluently in all the genres of Italian opera was central to their examination. In his musical notebook, dating from around 1771, Burney recalled these efforts:

Daines Barrington also focused on tests of Mozart's knowledge of operatic styles in his report to the Royal Society.Footnote ⁵

Another member of the group engaged in the appraisal of Mozart was David Steuart Erskine, Eleventh Earl of Buchan, by 1765 a committed antiquarian and natural scientist. In the new century, he wrote several times to Burney about child prodigies currently appearing in Edinburgh, using Mozart as a yardstick. On 13 March 1806 he offered his opinion that ‘he [Gattie] may perhaps become a British Mozart’.Footnote ⁶ Of much more interest is what he said in 1812 when recommending another young musician, Mary Ann Paton:

By this time, the image of the slight child, sitting on an adult's lap to enable him to perform at a keyboard, had become a familiar trope. Erskine's phraseology, though, owes more to Vicesimus Knox on sensibility than to the myths that were starting to shape accounts of Mozart's childhood. In an essay on old age, Knox wrote: ‘The tear of sensibility, said Juvenal, is the most honourable characteristic of the human race’.Footnote ⁸ Of his chosen example of childhood genius, the poet Thomas Chatterton, who took his own life at the age of seventeen, he noted the ‘tremulous sensibility of genius’.Footnote ⁹ Yet Erskine's reference to ‘voluntaries’, suggesting extemporization on a given theme, is credible, as it matches the tests that both Burney and Daines Barrington carried out in addition to their operatic challenges.

Erskine's meeting with Mozart probably took place towards the end of the family's stay in London. Until the death of his father, he was known as Lord Cardross, and it was under this title that his election to the Royal Society was widely reported in late June 1765.Footnote ¹⁰ Around this time he also visited the British Museum. On 19 July, the minutes of the Standing Committee of the Trustees recorded the following gifts:

It is quite possible that Erskine's gift was a gesture of thanks to Dr Matthew Maty, who by 1765 was active in both institutions, as Foreign Secretary of the Royal Society and as an under-librarian in the British Museum. On the same day as the entry in the minutes, Maty completed the pro forma letter of acknowledgement, a copy of which it was the custom to supply to each donor. In the document prepared for Leopold Mozart, he described his gift as the ‘present of the musical performances of your very ingenious son’.Footnote ¹² Leopold valued this proof of his son's success sufficiently that he took it back with him to Salzburg. The fact that Erskine's name appears next to Leopold Mozart's in the minute book does not prove that the two met in the British Museum, nor that Erskine heard Mozart play there. Maty's reference to ‘musical performances’, though, leaves open the possibility that a demonstration did take place, perhaps involving one of the sonatas k10–k15. If so, Leopold perhaps returned to add a copy to the four items that he had already presented.Footnote ¹³

Having assisted in the testing of Mozart's extraordinarily precocious understanding of Italian opera, Burney quite naturally followed the start of his career as a composer for the stage. When he met Leopold and his son in Bologna on 30 August 1770, he recorded his impression of Mozart's still slight physique: ‘The little man is grown considerably but is still a little man’. At the age of twelve, he was already ‘ingaged to compose an Opera for Milan’.Footnote ¹⁴ In due course Burney became aware of the contract for Lucio Silla, as shown by a sentence added to the description cited above: ‘He's engaged to compose a 2^nd opera for Milan next Carnaval’. It is very likely indeed that he learnt further details from the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini, who sang in the first performance run of Lucio Silla and for whom an admiring Mozart composed ‘Exsultate jubilate’ (k165). The singer greatly impressed Burney during his second continental tour. In the published account of 1773 he wrote:

After his return to England, Burney may have recommended Rauzzini to Frances Brooke, manager of the King's Theatre in London.Footnote ¹⁶ When Rauzzini arrived in London on 19 September 1774, well before the start of the new season, he quickly became part of Burney's social circle. There is no record of any discussion of Lucio Silla, but it would be surprising if Burney had not taken the opportunity to ask about the reception of this work.

Burney next encountered Mozart's vocal writing in 1779, when the castrato Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci showed him a scena composed by Mozart in Paris the previous year. The evidence for this lost piece comes in an appendix to one of Daines Barrington's Miscellanies, which takes the form of an update to his original report to the Royal Society. Under the date 21 January 1780, Barrington himself notes that Mozart ‘hath composed operas in several parts of Italy’. He then cites verbatim Burney's assessment of Tenducci's scena, one of his ‘latest compositions’:

After this favourable if slightly ambivalent evaluation, Burney finally lost contact with Mozart's progress altogether. He appears to have known nothing of Idomeneo or the success of Die Entführung.

The first opportunity Burney had to hear music from the Da Ponte operas came during the 1788–1789 and 1789–1790 seasons at the King's Theatre and the Little Theatre in the Haymarket. In 1789 ‘Crudel! perchè finora’ (Le nozze di Figaro, Act 3 Scene 2) was inserted into La vendemmia (9 May 1789) and ‘Non più andrai’ (Figaro, Act 1 Scene 8) into Il barbiere (11 June 1789), albeit for the character of Bartolo.Footnote ¹⁸ The London I due castellani burlati (2 February 1790) included ‘Voi che sapete’ (Figaro, Act 2 Scene 1) transposed for tenor and perhaps one other unidentified Mozart aria, while La villanella rapita (27 February 1790) featured not only the two insertion ensembles Mozart had written for Vienna (‘Dite almeno’, k479, and ‘Mandina amabile’, k480) but also ‘Batti, batti’ (Don Giovanni, Act 1 Scene 16) and ‘Deh vieni’ (Figaro, Act 4 Scene 10).Footnote ¹⁹ In all, this amounted to a significant display of enthusiasm for the composer's dramatic music which did not pass unnoticed in the public press. For the Morning Herald reviewer, Mozart's music was the highlight of the opera.Footnote ²⁰

A fashion for Italian opera originating in Vienna marked the final turbulent years of John Gallini's management of the King's Theatre. As impresario, he established active lines of communication with at least one source close to the Burgtheater. When Joseph II decided to close his opera buffa troupe in the summer of 1788, Gallini was quick to sign up its star singer Francesco Benucci, making use of the brief window of opportunity before the emperor had a characteristic change of mind. As one commentator jubilantly put it: ‘BINUCCI[,] like everybody else, has left the emperor’.Footnote ²¹ The centrality of this much-studied Vienna connection is obvious, yet it has obscured the fact that there were secondary conduits. The career paths of other singers, active in Prague or in German cities in which Mozart's operas were starting to become popular, also facilitated the transfer of this repertory.

A case in point is Gioacchino Costa. According to the Indice de teatrali spettacoli, he was a member of Pasquale Bondini's Italian company in Prague during the 1786–1787 season when Le nozze di Figaro caused a sensation, and he was still employed there as a tenor in 1789. His main claim to fame is that he took over the title role of Don Giovanni from Luigi Bassi at the opera's Leipzig premiere on 15 June 1788.Footnote ²² Costa arrived in London in time for the delayed start of the season, which was announced by the World on 2 January 1790.Footnote ²³ The cast of the opening work, Domenico Cimarosa's Ninetta, was to include ‘Signor GIACCHINO COSTA’ as the mezzo carattere. Early notices were favourable, if anodyne. A review in the Diary or Woodfall's Register (5 January 1790) expressed approval: ‘Some very pleasing melodies are allotted to Sig. Costa, the Mezzo-Carattere, and they are executed with science and ability’. But the World (8 January 1790) was more circumspect: ‘The new tenor, Costa is his name – is rather well, both in voice and manner; for as far as he goes, it is with feeling’. Almost immediately, an eighteenth-century troll weighed in. Squire Morgan, in the English Chronicle or Universal Evening Post (7 January 1790), ridiculed the singer: ‘a Mr. Costa, was encored and obliged to repeat his song, after it had been laughed at by the whole audience’. A formal review on the same page was hardly more encouraging: Costa was an ‘insipid’ tenor.

In his next role, Valerio in Vincenzo Fabrizi's I due castellani burlati, Costa introduced a version of Cherubino's ‘Voi che sapete’. The piece is tailored to its new situation, just before the Act 2 finale. Valerio knows that his problem is an age-old dilemma. As the English translation puts it: ‘to love is wrong, and not to love impossible’. His anguish (as opposed to the page's confusion) is expressed in a revised second line: ‘Donne vedete il mio dolor’ (Women, see my sorrow!). With or without this Mozart substitution, I due castellani burlati made little impression. One critic thought that the music had ‘neither variety nor spirit’ and that the opera was ‘incompetent to produce a single laugh’.Footnote ²⁴ The Times (8 February 1790) was even harsher: ‘tho’ considerably curtailed, [the opera] is yet most insufferably tedious, flat, and uninteresting’.

How Costa came to sing ‘Voi che sapete’ in London is unclear. Owing to his years in the Bondini-Guardasoni troupe, he must have known Le nozze di Figaro well. He may, indeed, have played the Count both in Prague and Leipzig.Footnote ²⁵ The most straightforward explanation is that he simply liked this aria, and that he acquired a copy for his personal portfolio for use in concert programmes. When selecting their repertory, singers did not usually feel restricted by the gender of the original stage characters. In the months following the Leipzig premiere of Don Giovanni, ‘Il mio tesoro’ was performed at the Tomäisches Haus on 4 January 1789; the same aria (transposed) was given by Madame Schicht in the rival Gewandhaus on 5 February.Footnote ²⁶ A singer could also legitimately request to have a favourite piece incorporated through substitution in the production of a different opera, as perhaps Costa did in I due castellani burlati. Early in 1789 ‘Voi che sapete’ was advertised in Vienna as a tenor aria, suggesting the possibility that a male singer participating in the benefit pasticcio L'ape musicale had performed it.Footnote ²⁷

A more intriguing explanation for the appearance of ‘Voi che sapete’ in London in a transposed version is the presence in the city of the composer Angelo Tarchi. Recruited by Gallini as a ‘house’ composer for serious opera, he arrived in London in March 1788, although not much is known about his first season.Footnote ²⁸ Little attention has been paid to the possibility that he influenced the early reception of Mozart's operatic music in England. In view of the re-formation of the celebrated partnership between Anna Storace and Francesco Benucci at the King's Theatre in May 1789, Price, Milhous and Hume wondered why ‘something more substantial and up-to-date than Gazzaniga's dramma giocoso of 1778’ was not chosen for their debut; or, to be blunt about it, why did Gallini not select Le nozze di Figaro?Footnote ²⁹ An answer may be found in Tarchi's controversial prior engagement with the work. A few months before his London appointment, he had prepared a remarkable ‘arrangement’ of Le nozze di Figaro for its prestigious Monza premiere on 18 November 1787. This was given in the presence of Ferdinand, who thereby became the first of the Habsburg brothers to hear the opera as a festive work, a status it achieved not in 1786, but when it was selected to replace Don Giovanni in Prague in 1787.

For whatever reason, Tarchi saw fit to replace the second half of the opera with his own music.Footnote ³⁰ This drastic action, seemingly unique in the late eighteenth century, resulted ex post facto in a jointly authored version. It facilitated additional censorship. The transfer of ‘Voi che sapete’ to the Count as an Act 1 entrance aria had the effect of muting somewhat Cherubino's expression of his awakening sexuality. Through the expedient of removing or adding the word ‘non’ in lines four and ten, a worldly-wise aristocrat emerges to replace the uncertain page: the feeling is not new for him (‘Ei non m’è nova’); he does understand it (‘Capir lo so’). The complete excision of the role of Barbarina, a controversial figure as an inappropriately young recipient of the Count's attentions, may also have been an official requirement, yet the interventions necessary to effect these changes were relatively straightforward.Footnote ³¹ It is unclear whether the suggestion for a more extensive rewrite came from the composer or was at the behest of the management. Writing in 1935 in the spirit of the times, Alfred Einstein castigated Tarchi's action; whatever its motivation, it demonstrated a ‘supreme ability for not recognizing genius’.Footnote ³² News that the second half of Mozart's opera had been replaced was not confined to the title-page of the libretto, it was trumpeted across Europe: ‘LE NOZZE DI FIGARO, avec des choeurs, le premier et le deuxième acte, musique del Signor Wolfgango Mozart; le troisième et le quatrième, musique nouvelle del Sig. Ang. Tarchi’.Footnote ³³ In the absence of any clue to Tarchi's attitude towards the revision he chose or was obliged to execute, it is impossible to infer what his advice to Gallini might have been, had he been consulted about the feasibility of a production. All that can be said with certainty is that the English impresario had access to a musician with a recent and very detailed knowledge of what it would take to stage this work.

In his second London season,Footnote ³⁴ Tarchi scored a notable success writing for the great castrato Marchesi. A month before this triumph, a piece of Mozart's operatic music, the duet ‘Crudel! perchè finora’ from the start of Act 3 of Figaro, was heard in a King's Theatre production for the first time. Although Benucci was not originally cast as the Count, his performance with Storace of this ‘delicious’ duet in Giuseppe Gazzaniga's La vendemmia was received with great enthusiasm.Footnote ³⁵ That it was the first piece to have been jettisoned by Tarchi may be no more than coincidence, yet the possibility that someone was making a point cannot be discounted altogether.Footnote ³⁶

There is no conclusive evidence that Burney attended any of these operas, yet it is highly likely that he did so. For years he had been an assiduous member of the King's Theatre audience. That he was by now aware of the existence of recent operas by Mozart is demonstrated by other evidence. As a subscriber to Heinrich Philipp Bossler's Bibliothek der Grazien (1789),Footnote ³⁷ he received two ‘songs’ by Mozart, published in early issues of this serial. The following year, he selected one of them as a sightreading test for the child prodigy Johann Nepomuk Hummel. This occasion reawakened memories of his first encounter with Mozart in 1764. In a letter to Fanny Burney dated [13] December [1790], he described Hummel's performance thus:

This ‘song’ was either ‘Vedrai carino’, the first piece in the inaugural January issue, or ‘Mi tradì, quell'alma ingrata’ from the May issue, entitled ‘Recitativo dell'Opera IL DON GIOVANNI del Sigre MOZART’. The latter piece, incidentally, would have posed a far sterner test of sightreading than ‘Vedrai carino’. Bossler regularly promoted music from Vienna, as, for example, in the February issue, which was dominated by Salieri's Axur (‘Soave luce’, ‘S'io ti salvai’ and ‘V'andrò tutto’). The choice of a piece by Mozart for the test was obvious, given that the young Hummel had been the composer's pupil. In describing this occasion, Burney was struck by the coincidence that ‘30 years after his Master Mozart had been recommended to me, & played on my knee, on subjects I gave him . . . this little Man sh^d also claim and merit my kindness’.Footnote ³⁹

In the early months of 1789 Burney received an unsolicited offer of a score of a complete Mozart opera (and/or one by Haydn), which for reasons unknown he rejected, a very significant missed opportunity:

The translation and Burney's reply in a ‘foul copy’ (rough draft), either of which would have disclosed the reason why this offer was rejected, seem not to have survived. Without knowing it, Burney had turned down a chance to establish contact with a source close both to Mozart's family circle and to Haydn in Eszterháza.

The author of this unsolicited letter was almost certainly Franz Anton Weber, who was on the point of leaving Hamburg to try his luck as an independent opera impresario. Burney (or more likely a translator) gathered enough of this to know that a reply was urgent. Franz Anton, brother of Fridolin – the father of Mozart's wife Constanze and her sister Aloysia Lange – had enjoyed a six-month sojourn in Vienna and Eszterháza in 1785, towards the end of which, on 20 August, he married his second wife in the Schottenkirche. Joseph Lange (his nephew by marriage) and Vincenzo Righini were present as witnesses.Footnote ⁴¹ After he returned to northern Germany, he arranged for Edmund and Fridolin, two sons from his previous marriage, to become students of Haydn. Edmund travelled south in September 1786, hoping for instruction to prepare him for a career as a music director.Footnote ⁴² During the following year, he became acquainted with Mozart, his cousin by marriage, who entered an aphorism about hard work in his album on 8 January 1787.Footnote ⁴³ When the time approached for Edmund to return to his family, others made entries. Maximilian Stadler wrote on 3 April 1788: ‘May you soon rival your master Haydn and your friend Mozart’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Haydn himself offered parting advice on 22 May. A photograph of this page of the album was later supplied to his biographer Carl Ferdinand Pohl by none other than Johannes Brahms.Footnote ⁴⁵ The other brother Fridolin served briefly in the Eszterháza orchestra between April and September 1788.

The ongoing digitization of the Weber family correspondence in the Carl-Maria-von-Weber-Gesamtausgabe: Digitale Edition sheds fascinating light on the precarious existence of Franz Anton's troupe in the weeks and months after he left Hamburg, first for Kassel and Marburg, and then Meiningen in Thuringia.Footnote ⁴⁶ At least ‘old’ Weber's family was numerous, as noted by Vincent Weyrauch, his future son-in-law. The company which was in the process of being formed by Franz Anton included his second wife Genovefa, née Brenner, as well as three children from his first marriage: Fridolin, Edmund and his wife Josepha, and Jeanette with ‘yours truly’, her future husband Vincent.Footnote ⁴⁷ In a letter to the impresario Gustav Friedrich Wilhelm Grossmann about his daughter early in 1789, Weber stated in her favour that Jeanette had been a pupil both of Mozart and Aloysia Lange.Footnote ⁴⁸ Given her age and employment history, the period of tuition may be dated to the spring of 1785. It is thus probable that she travelled to Vienna with her father. Aged sixteen at the oldest, Jeanette – she adopted this identity in preference to her cumbersome collection of given names, Maria Anna Theresia Magdalena Antonetta – was offered a position in Friedrich Ludwig Schröder's German company in Hamburg. It is possible that she was recommended by Aloysia Lange, reputedly the actor's favourite singer.Footnote ⁴⁹ According to the Theater Kalendar for 1788, Mademoiselle Weber specialized in soubrette roles and in ‘mothers’ in singspiel.Footnote ⁵⁰ But reviews were not in general favourable, one noting that her gestures were ‘wooden’.Footnote ⁵¹ When she attempted a career move to Grossmann's company early in 1789, any chance she may have had was effectively scuppered by a letter from Schröder himself, who observed that she had skill but was the ugliest creature on stage, acted wretchedly and could not captivate with her voice. She would never fulfil her wish to attain the status of a prima donna, and he was thus happy to relinquish her.Footnote ⁵² For the time being, Jeanette had no option but to join her father's troupe. The value of his children's past as pupils of Haydn and Mozart, especially after the death of the latter, was well understood by Franz Anton, and he continued to trade on these connections.Footnote ⁵³

Before he decided to form a travelling opera company, Franz Anton had been very active as a supplier of musical scores. In this capacity, he probably acted both as an agent and as a copyist himself if the need arose. The scale of his operation as well as his proactive approach is clear from a letter he wrote on 3 November 1785, eight days after returning from Vienna. He offered the businessman and music-lover Patrick Alströmer in Uppsala ‘a true treasure of the most beautiful musical scores in every conceivable genre’. The list of genres that follows is indeed substantial, and it is accompanied by an equally long roster of composers, ending with Mozart and Wranitzky.Footnote ⁵⁴ He remained in touch with Artaria, a fellow Freemason, expressing interest in new repertory.Footnote ⁵⁵ His commercial strategy was to act as a conduit for recent Viennese successes into northern Europe. There was certainly money to be made in this market provided that a supplier could act quickly and price reasonably. He wrote to Artaria again on 23 October 1788, enquiring about Haydn's quartets ‘Sopra Le Sette Parole di Jesu Xto’ and quartet versions of music from Salieri's La grotta di Trofonio. He expressed interest in new material that had emerged since his visit, especially Mozart's string quintets. These were advertised for sale by subscription in the Wiener Zeitung (2 April 1788), but the offer had to be withdrawn (25 June 1788) owing to the lack of demand. Weber also asked about the most recent quartets of Haydn. It is very interesting that he should associate the name Tost with them, as a formal dedication to the violinist did not appear until the publication of the subsequent set composed during 1790 (Op. 64).Footnote ⁵⁶

On 20 January 1789 Franz Anton wrote to offer Grossmann a score of Salieri's La grotta di Trofonio, perhaps the one published by Artaria.Footnote ⁵⁷ Like others, he had identified Grossmann, based in Hanover, as a key figure in the transfer of Viennese operatic repertory to the lucrative northern market, but the competition to supply him was intense. Two recent studies of Grossmann's contacts have focused on Anton Grams in Prague and the firm of Simrock in Bonn, with its associate Christian Gottlob Neefe.Footnote ⁵⁸ On 31 December 1787 Grossmann informed Neefe that he had established a ‘wohlfeilern Kanal’ (a cheaper conduit) with Prague than was on offer from Simrock. It seems that this refers to a proposal made by Grams in a letter written on 5 September 1787. (It is dated 1786, but this is almost certainly a mistake, as otherwise it would refer to L'arbore di Diana a full year before its likely date of commission.) After his troupe started performing, Franz Anton Weber continued to supply scores. When he moved on to Meiningen later in 1789, he was paid for music, including some scores by Mozart.Footnote ⁵⁹ There is no evidence, though, that his itinerant troupe performed a German version of Le nozze di Figaro or Don Giovanni in its first seasons in Kassel or Marburg. Neither work had been given in Hamburg yet, although the premiere of the latter was to take place on 27 October. But Die Entführung was in Weber's repertory, and the Meiningen subscription season ended with a performance starring Franz Anton's second wife, Genovefa.Footnote ⁶⁰

Weber's offer to Burney in London was clearly part of his wider strategy of supplying Viennese repertory to willing buyers in northern cities such as Uppsala, Hamburg and Hanover, but it is not clear why he chose this moment to make contact, nor which operas were on offer. Like other musicians in the city, he was no doubt aware that Hamburg was an essential source of information for the music historian as he struggled with the German chapter in the final volume of his General History. Yet the offer could equally have been made with performance in mind, as the powerful influence Burney exerted on repertory selection at the King's Theatre was well known everywhere. Altogether more intriguing, if inevitably speculative, is the idea that he had his nephew-in-law Mozart's interests in mind, with or without his direct sanction. Mozart's plan to travel to England in 1787 had quickly foundered on the fact that his friend Stephen Storace already had an engagement to compose opera at the King's Theatre, but Storace had now left, his one original Italian opera for London, La cameriera astuta (4 March 1788), having achieved at best a modest success. In the early months of 1789, an unprecedented gathering of Weber family members, including five of Mozart's relations by marriage, were in Hamburg preparing for their new operatic venture. In view of their close family ties to Vienna, news that Mozart was considering his options, even that he was about to travel north to Leipzig and Berlin, could have arrived very quickly, well before any public announcements. The same is true of reports that Benucci was soon to re-form his partnership with Storace at the King's Theatre, an equally plausible reason for Weber to have thought that his offer might be taken up.

In the first half of 1789 Burney clearly had access to a range of sources pointing unequivocally to Mozart's growing reputation as an opera composer, yet none of them left a lasting impression. The most likely explanation, a very human one, is the fact that he had just completed A General History of Music. Sheer mental exhaustion at the end of his monumental project and exhilaration at no longer being bound by its demands would have been entirely understandable reactions. The third and fourth volumes were with the printers by the end of 1788, and the publication ‘this day’ was announced on 5 May 1789.Footnote ⁶¹ Liberated from the ever-present burden of having to come up with a judicious evaluation of whatever repertory came his way, Burney, quite simply, appears to have taken time out from his self-appointed role as interpreter of the musical world.

It is also reasonable to consider whether, in the rush to complete his magnum opus, Burney had developed a distorted view of the contemporary scene that itself contributed to his failure to ‘notice’ Mozart. A lack of intelligence concerning the most recent operatic developments in Vienna is the most obvious lacuna in the chapter on German music. Burney is unaware of Figaro, he fails to mention Martín y Soler, and Salieri receives praise only for his Parisian triumphs. He was of course cognizant of the political division in the German-speaking world, yet his interpretative focus, curiously, alighted upon religion. Acknowledging the present ‘tranquillity’, he nevertheless laid great stress on the confessional divide, going so far as to assert that Catholics were still ‘unwilling to listen to the musical strains of the Protestants’ and vice versa. This was a seriously dated view. By 1789, it was flying in the face of all the facts to claim that works from Vienna were going unappreciated in northern cities like Hamburg, where Schröder's theatre company regularly featured operas by Dittersdorf and Martín y Soler in its schedules.Footnote ⁶² Burney obviously knew virtually nothing of the context in which Don Giovanni and Le nozze di Figaro were making their belated impact in Germany. Late in the day, an informant with up-to-date knowledge might still have been able to rebalance the picture, but, by chance, the man he relied upon as his de facto assistant throughout 1788 was the Moravian pastor Christian Ignaz Latrobe. The latter's journal provides useful insights into the wide-ranging musical intelligence that he was able to offer Burney, yet his distaste for opera was obvious, and when offered a ticket, he would usually find an excuse not to attend.Footnote ⁶³

A keen amateur musician, Latrobe was a reasonably proficient keyboard player, and, at a rather lower level, he also participated in string quartets on the viola and in wind bands on the clarinet. He attended concerts regularly, had no problem with ‘operatic’ church music and was a committed collector of repertory. With a good command of German and long-standing connections in Saxony, he was, in many ways, an ideal informant. Unable to read or write ‘Charman’, Burney relied heavily on Latrobe's linguistic competence. Eventually, and with some reluctance, he took on the role of unpaid assistant, agreeing to peruse complete draft chapters. Following a long session on 14 January (‘contrary to my intention’), an exhausted Latrobe described Burney as an ‘indefatigable’ man, while on 5 September he accepted an invitation (‘against my inclination’) and ended up putting in a five-hour stint.Footnote ⁶⁴ He was, nevertheless, a great admirer of Burney's project, and the work of rivals was given short shrift: Joel Collier's satirical Musical Travels through England was a ‘nasty pamphlet’ (10 June); Forkel's Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik was ‘a sad impudent imitation’ (20 August); Wendeborn's State of music in England ‘a most wooden and stiff piece of business’ (13 January 1789).Footnote ⁶⁵ The most intriguing aspect of Latrobe's role was the opportunity it afforded him to shape Burney's perceptions, through summarizing content and drawing his attention to particular passages.Footnote ⁶⁶ On 26 August 1788 he undertook an extended literature review: ‘spent the day till 6 o'clock with D^r Burney looking over old German Music Books & Music to assist in his History of Music’. Burney's admission that he needed Latrobe to explain ‘bits and scraps’ before, as he put it, he ‘fretted himself to sauerkraut’, says it all.Footnote ⁶⁷

On 16 October 1788 Latrobe left England for a short tour of Saxony. Up-to-date musical news was the elixir on which Burney thrived, and upon his informant's return he seized the chance to ‘compare notes’. The most interesting entry in Latrobe's journal from his period away came on 8 January 1789, as he passed through Leipzig on his way back to London. In the morning, he called into Breitkopf to purchase ‘Bach's choral[e] tunes’, but he then went on to a concert in the Gewandhaus, recording interesting observations on dress and etiquette:

Arias from recent Viennese operas were the height of fashion in the 1788–1789 Leipzig concert season. As chance would have it, the performance he attended featured music by Martín y Soler, a scena from L'arbore di Diana and an unidentified terzetto. Had he passed through the city in one of the weeks before or after this, he might well have encountered arias and ensembles from Le nozze di Figaro or Don Giovanni, but it was now too late for new intelligence to have any influence on Burney's history; its final volumes were already in press.

One of the ironies of Burney's missed opportunity is that Latrobe, having translated the letter of rejection in 1789, found himself a decade and a half later actively engaged in attempting to purchase a score of Don Giovanni. He wrote to Burney on 15 July 1803: ‘You gave me directions to get Don Giovanni for You, when I was last with You. It is a comic Opera & reported to be his best work of that kind’.Footnote ⁶⁹ But even this did not presage an early public performance in London. So belated, indeed, was the appearance of this opera at the King's Theatre – not until 1817 was there a full production – that a group of amateurs took matters into their own hands by organizing private performances.Footnote ⁷⁰ Burney, meanwhile, though on distinctly shaky ground, shaped the historiography of Mozart's purported disappearance as a composer of vocal music from the English radar to his own ends. Had he accepted the offer of a full score of Le nozze di Figaro or Don Giovanni in 1789, recognized its merits and advocated a production in the King's Theatre, Mozart's relationship with England might well have taken a strikingly different course.