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Published: 02 October 2026

We owe much of our sense of what the late eighteenth century sounded like to a peripatetic organist from Shrewsbury. Charles Burney, who in the early 1770s travelled through France, Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, a composer more jobbing than great and too often unfairly consigned to a footnote. But he listened, he asked questions of the European music scene, and he wrote it all down: the instruments in the room, the manner of the players, the temper of the patron. His tours, and later his General History of Music, made the Continental musical world legible to English readers. When Haydn arrived in London in 1791, it was Burney who helped smooth his path, and it is largely through Burney's ear that we know how a Haydn keyboard sounded in an English drawing room.

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