Music as the food of love

Susanna Burney was the younger sister of the more famous Fanny (one of the best-loved of English diarists and author of Evelina). Born in 1755, three years after Fanny, Susanna began writing a journal long before Fanny had conceived the idea of confiding her thoughts ‘To Nobody’.

Susanna’s diaries (still unpublished) tell us less about the personalities in the Burney circle — and they were an extra- ordinary bunch, including not just Garrick, Johnson and Mrs Thrale, but also Burke, Sheridan and James Bruce, the explorer of Abyssinia — but they are recognised by those who have read them in the British Library, pasted into hefty leather-bound tomes, as a treasure chest of information about the musical life of London in the late 1770s and early 1780s. It was a period when the opera houses in Covent Garden and the Haymarket were the most exciting musical venues in Europe, constantly staging the first performances of works by Italian, French, German and English composers, many of which have since been lost.