EDITORIAL

Extract

Charles Burney had high hopes for Naples. As he trekked ever southward in the summer of 1770, stopping along the way at Turin, Milan, Venice, Bologna, Florence and Rome, he imagined his approach to Naples as an ascent to a musical Parnassus: ‘My visits to other places were in the way of business, for the performance of a task I had assigned myself; but I came hither animated by the hope of pleasure. And what lover of music could be in the place which had produced the two Scarlattis, Vinci, Leo, Pergolesi, Porpora, Farinelli, Jommelli, Piccinni, Traetta, Sacchini, and innumerable others of the first eminence among composers and performers, both vocal and instrumental, without the most sanguine expectations?’. The recent account of a similar pilgrimage by Jérôme de Lalande had whetted Burney’s appetite for a city the Frenchman described as ‘the principal source of Italian music, of great composers, and of excellent operas’ (Voyage d’un François en Italie, 1769). Moreover, as he progressed down the peninsula he met musician after musician with ties to that Mecca of the south. And so he wrote of his arrival ‘about five o’clock in the evening, on Tuesday, October 16’: ‘I entered this city, impressed with the highest ideas of the perfect state in which I should find practical music’. His reverie, however, was short-lived. Indeed, he quickly formed an aversion to flesh-and-blood Neapolitan vocalists, instrumentalists, their performance practices, the audiences, even the gilding in the churches – in short, most of what he