itself to their admirers, and where the delicacy of that sex puts everyone on his guard, lest he give offence by any breach of decency.”28
Such accounts of positive feminization aside, women serve more broadly in Hume to measure distance from barbarism and antiquity, in which, he insists, women were hidden from view in virtual slavery. The sovereignty of women in Hume’s conversable realm feminized that space not to reduce its value, nor to imply a literal female rule, but rather as a way of characterizing its fascinating and transformative modernity: sociable, peaceful, animated, intellectual, polite, improving, luxurious, unprejudiced. The female sovereign stands metonymically for the ideal citizen (or subject) of the republic (or empire) who deals not in literal, legislative power but in discursive authority and persuasion. She is an aspect of the (male) author’s voice, as much as a critic and reader of his work.29
The trope of refining womanhood is felt in Burney’s frequent and approving references to the mixed company and elegant manners of musical salons and soirées. For example, in Florence Burney attended the salon, or, as he called it, conversatione, of Signora Madalena Morelli, “which is much frequented by the foreigners, and men of letters, at Florence.” He described Morelli as a figure of broad accomplishment able to foster a range of artistic activities: “Besides her wonderful talent of speaking verses extempore upon any given subject, and being able to play a ripieno part, on the violin, in concert, she sings with a great deal of expression, and has a considerable share of execution.”30 Such scenes are formalized in A General History where, women (so to speak) break into the last chapter, their very presence a distinguishing feature of music history’s most recent chapter. Not just the presence but the absence of women is given explanatory power in Burney’s Tours. Much of Burney’s famous criticism of music at the Berlin court of Frederick the Great of Prussia turns on the reported absence of women and, related to this, the persistence of rough, unreformed male manners. Dismissing a flute concerto by M. Reidt as “ancient and coarse,” Burney likened Berlin musicians to a gang of sailors shoving each other in “the old naval sport of running the hoop.”31 That is, they compete by force, playing in a constant forte, without dynamic nuance or coordinated ensemble. The notion that unreformed masculinity belongs to the past comes through in Burney’s comments on the historically fixed military parade at Potsdam that takes place “in a field, enclosed by a wall. . . . With respect to music, the same stability of style, and of taste, is observable here as at court; and I did not find that the Prussians, in their marches, had advanced a single step towards novelty, or refinement, since the first years of his present majesty’s reign.” Apollo and his muses still inhabit Berlin, but the former is constrained in his movements, Burney advised, and his muses are not daughters but “sons.”
There is a telling exception to the banishment of women from Berlin in the figure of Gertrud Schmeling, the prima donna at the Berlin court, who appears in Burney’s narrative as a sort of Germania enchained. Although her compass and coloratura are “truly astonishing” and her powers are perhaps unrivalled anywhere in the world, she at the same time is unable to complete her development—to become perfect, a living muse. Constrained to sing airs “in which she has passages, that degrade the voice into an instrument . . . [s]he does not seem, at present, to be placed in the best school for advancement in taste, expression, high finishing.” Were she to spend time in Italy she would return, in Burney’s analogy, “like the Venus of Apelles . . . an aggregate of all that is exquisite and beautiful.”32 The Venus of the Greek painter Apelles (mentioned by Pliny and said to have inspired Botticelli’s iconic Birth of Venus) did not survive antiquity but served in critical discourse as a reference to both perfect mimesis and feminine gracefulness. Burney compared Schmeling not to the painter but to this painted image, even as he set that image out of reach, awaiting a period of greater liberty. For the time being Schmeling is just a brilliant singer; before she can become perfect, an ideal aesthetic construct, male manners must reform and despotism withdraw from the temple of the muses.
Burney often figured modern musical style as (in a positive sense) feminized, largely equating feminization with progress from barbarism to civility. Although he was alive to differences connected to compositional genre, function, and locale, and occasionally nostalgic for the rough sublimity of earlier styles, Burney nonetheless projected an understanding of music history as a movement from the rough to the smooth, the confused to the crystalline, the pedantic to the pleasing, and the inflexible to the insinuating. In speaking of Telemann’s “first and second manners” Burney came close to a parody of his own historiography: “This author, like the painter Raphael, had a first and second manner, which were extremely different from each other. In the first, he was hard, stiff, dry, and inelegant; in the second, all that was pleasing, graceful, and refined.”33 Such bald binary oppositions also attend Burney’s conceptualizations of performance and organology; writing about a “M. Spandau,” in the Hague, who had brought new elegance to the French horn, Burney wrote: “He has contrived, by his delicacy, taste, and expression, to render an instrument, which, from its coarseness, could formerly be only supported in the open air, or in a spacious building, equally soft and pleasing with the sweetest human voice.”34 Music, then, could embody (and disembody) the sovereign feminine.
LIVING MUSES
Hume’s female sovereigns illuminate Burney’s ideas of history, music, and gender, but the women of the Tours and General History differ in a crucial regard from the anonymous abstractions of Hume’s essays: they are named individuals with contexts and biographies. Burney’s women exist simultaneously in empirical and allegorical domains, at once material and mythical. Some are distinguished from the men with whom they share the historical stage by a peculiarly intense doubleness. Concrete details about appearance, character, and context take on an abstract, almost generic, quality, as if these portraits sought to project not the individuality of the sitter but something from the realm of the ideal. However, two case studies (of Marianne Martinez and Maria Antonia Walpurgis) will illustrate how those ideals fold back into the historically concrete situation of their author, projecting political affiliations and (related) aesthetic ideals all the more forcefully for their apparent abstraction and constraining idealization. That dynamic is not unique to Burney; indeed, it seems more exemplary than exceptional. It is apparent in two images by Burney’s London contemporary Richard Samuel (recently discussed by Elizabeth Eger), from which I have borrowed the term “living muse.”
Samuel’s engraving titled The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain was printed in a now rare ladies’ pocket book, an illustrated diary, of 1778 (there is no known copy in the United Kingdom). A related but not identical painting, probably produced subsequently, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1779 with the title Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (now in the National Portrait Gallery, London; figure 2). A convergence of luxury, patriotism, and female accomplishment is evident in the images, both of which identify and at the same time conceal the actual appearance and context of the sitters (who, moreover, probably did not “sit” specifically for the works). Although even the sitters struggled to recognize themselves in Samuel’s painting, the earlier engraving provides the key, for their names are emblazoned across the bottom of the print (in left to right reversal) for the edification and emulation of readers of the Ladies Pocket Book of 1778: Miss Carter, Mrs. Barbauld, and Mrs. Angelica Kauffman on the right hand; Mrs. Sheridan, in the middle; and Mrs. Lennox, Mrs. Macaulay, Miss More, Mrs. Montague, and Mrs. Griffith on the left hand. This naming aside, a neoclassical composition, emphasizing harmonious coexistence and similarity, appears more important than individuality. The women’s radically different ages, politics, and social positions are smoothed over in favor of a politely gynosocial community.35 Similarly, differences between artistic media are downplayed in an image of peaceful accord and unity that can be read as both a reference to “the sister arts” and, with reference to character (national and personal), as an antonym of the martial and the bellicose so commonly (as in Burney’s Berlin) identified with masculine artistic strivings.36
FIGURE 2. Richard Samuel, Portraits in the Characters of the Muses in the Temple of Apollo (1779). Reproduced with permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London.