J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

all, he had to present the unregenerate Burney as an idolatrous Handelian. Posterity
has tended to see him this way, but even a moderately careful reading of his works
shows that this is simply not true. A sincere admirer of Handel at what he considered
his best, he did not hesitate to criticise him where (in Burney’s view) he fell below this
standard, or had been superseded by later composers. At least, this was true in private;
Roger Lonsdale and Kerry Grant have documented the tortuous process by which,
when drafting his publications, he would sometimes alter or even reverse critical
judgements, presumably with his intended readership in mind. 85 Burney may not have
been a single-minded Handelian, but many potential patrons were, and unlike Hawkins
(who had an independent income) Burney was dependent upon noble patronage for
much of his livelihood.
Secondly, he had to emphasise Burney’s former distaste for J. S. Bach. The
attitude displayed in the History and Present State of Music in Germany, the
Netherlands, and United Provinces, however, is by no means as negative as often
thought. While hardly granting Bach the pre-eminence he is usually accorded today,
Burney speaks of him with the tone of qualified approval he used for most of the
composers he admired. In fact, he felt (with some justice) that he deserved the credit
for introducing the name of J. S. Bach to the English musical public, and—in private
—complained that Samuel Wesley had stolen his thunder: ‘I can boast of being the
first to make my country acquainted with J. Seb. Bach, for when my German tour was
first published, there were perhaps not above four professors in the Kingdom who had
ever heard his name.’ 86
The reason that Burney was not exclusively a Handelian was that it was not in
85 K. Grant, Dr Burney as critic and historian of music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983),
pp.287-90. R. Lonsdale, Dr Charles Burney: a literary biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965),
pp.296-314 in particular tells of the agonising process of drafting his account of the 1784 Handel
Commemoration, and the intense editorial pressure he was under from the Handelian bloc—one of
whom was the King himself.
86 Annotation to a draft of a letter to Wesley, 17 October 1808, quoted in Grant, Dr Burney, p.194.
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