Burney, Charles. (1726-1814)
A General History of Music. From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period. To Which is Prefixed, A Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients. - INSCRIBED PRESENTATION COPIES TO BURNEY'S ITALIAN AND FRENCH TRANSLATOR, C.D. EBELING
London: Printed for the Author: And sold by T. Becket; J. Robson; and G. Robinson.. 1776, 1782, 1789, 1789.. First edition. Four large quarto volumes (10 7/8 x 8 5/8 inches; 275 x 220 mm). xx, [12], 522, [1, blank]; [4], 597, [1, blank], [1, errata]; xi, [1, blank], 622, [11, index] [1, errata]; [4], 685, [1, blank], [2, publisher's ads], [12, index], [1, errata], [1, blank] pp. Twelve engraved plates, including the four frontispieces. Engraved frontispieces in Volumes I-III by F. Bartolozzi after G.B. Cipriani and E.F. Burney, engraved frontispiece portrait in Volume IV by F. Bartolozzi after Sir Joshua Reynolds (dated 1784), and nine additional plates one of which is folding. Engraved musical illustrations throughout text. The dedicatory epistle to the queen is said by Grove to have been written for Burney by his friend, Samuel Johnson. Contemporary full calf, rebacked to style. Volumes 1 and 2 inscribed "For Professor Ebeling from the Author." An extraordinary inscribed presentation set of the first history of music in the English language. Hirsch I Anhang 16; RISM BVI p. 190.A very rare autograph presentation set from the important English musician to his translator, the writer and teacher at the Hamburg Commercial Academy, Christoph Daniel Ebeling (1741 - 1817). Charles Burney, organist, minor composer, and dedicated minor astronomer, was father of the novelists Fanny Burney and Sarah Harriet Burney. He was also a man of considerable general learning who travelled extensively in France, Italy, and Germany in pursuit of musical knowledge. He was friends with numerous literary figures of the time including Garrick, Reynolds, Burke, and Samuel Johnson, who contributed several lines of translation in Volume II of this work and is mentioned in the list of subscribers, along with William Horatio Walpole, and M. Diderot.
"Although little is heard about Ebeling any more, during his own day he was well connected in intellectual and musical circles wtih acquaintances that included C.P.E. Bach, Friedrich Klopstock, Johann David Michaelis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth. He was also an important writer and cultural disseminator whose wide-ranging interests were channeled in writings on U.S. history, a ten-volume travel anthology, contributions to Friedrich Nicolai's 'Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek' (1765 - 1796), and the coeditorship of a journal, 'Unterhaltungen' (1766 - 1770). Among his great passions was the cultivation of music. He published one of the earliest German music histories, 'Versuch einer auserlesenen musikalischen Bibliothek' (1770), and, as the translator of Burney's first French and Italian tour, introduced German readers to a new way of studying and writing about music - the musical travelogue." (Vanessa Agnew, "Enlightenment Orpheus," p. 16) (10315)
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