in her operas; in Munich “Signora Mingotti” holds forth on music “with as much intelligence as any maestro di cappella.”1 There is barely a negative comment about the fair sex in The Present State of Music in France and Italy, The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces, or A General History of Music: From the Earliest Ages to the Present Period. Admittedly, Burney was underwhelmed by the performance of the girls of the Ospidale della Pietà in Venice (“the composition and performance I heard to-night did not exceed mediocrity”). There was also a hiccup in Burney’s regime of praise when he congratulated Mrs. Hamilton for the “expression and meaning in her playing” given that “ladies . . . though frequently neat in execution, seldom aim at expression.”2 But this aside, Burney’s books are lined with accomplished women, heirs to history, and embodiments of its present.
Just as striking is what Burney praised women for: knowledge, expertise, education. Such terms were far removed from Rousseau’s influential idealization of women in terms of the natural and the naive.3 In Passy Burney met Madame Brillon, “one of the greatest lady-players on the harpsichord in Europe. This lady not only plays the most difficult pieces with great precision, taste, and feeling, but is an excellent sight’s-woman; . . . she likewise composes; and was so obliging as to play several of her own sonatas, both on the harpsichord and piano forte. . . . But her application and talents are not confined to the harpsichord; she plays on several instruments; knows the genius of all that are in common use, which she said it was necessary for her to do, in order to avoid composing for them such things as were either impracticable or unnatural.”4 If Burney concluded with a generic notion of female accomplishment (“she likewise draws well and engraves, and is a most accomplished and agreeable woman”), this is less to contain her achievements than to assuage suspicions that such an erudite woman must be in some ways masculine or confusing—a gender monster—or, in terms used by Brillon herself, “impracticable and unnatural.”5 Even scientific erudition did not exceed Burney’s conception of female nature. Of the scientist “Dottoressa Madame Laura Bassi,” whom he visited in Bologna, he assured his readers that “though learned, and a genius, [she] is not at all masculine or assuming.”6
Such emphasis on female rationality and educability does not indicate reluctance on Burney’s part to acknowledge raw talent. In Madame Karsch, the Berlin poet, Burney discovered an “original genius” that he ranked next to Klopstock: “This lady is quite a meteor, and surprises more by the elevation of her poems, on account of her low origin, she being descended from parents who were unable to afford her a liberal education, and married very young to a serjeant [sic], in a regiment quartered at Glogau.” Having bestowed on Karsch the often sex-specific accolade of original genius, Burney went on to endorse her productivity and profile in the literary marketplace: “When she first arrived at Berlin, a few of her verses were handed about, which were so much approved, that a subscription was opened for printing a collection of them: since that time she has supported herself with dignity, by the productions of her pen.”7 In this story of upward mobility Karsch’s career is founded on genius, promoted by subscription, and sustained by commerce. Burney’s reference to “dignity” invites the reader to embrace this vertiginous combination of woman, authorship, and commerce.
Not all Burney’s European women survived the voyage from travel diary to A General History, but in the final chapter 12 of the final volume of the General History (1789) Burney included numerous native female musicians.8 This created the patriotic and decidedly modern impression that the history of music culminated in the full participation of both sexes in the public concert life and theaters of contemporary London. On a mission not just to inform but to reform, Burney described the historical prejudice against theatrical singers, particularly women (4:631). In the following paragraphs, in tracing the rise of concerts and musical theater, women appear equally alongside men in the historical record, as if, in modern England, personal liberty and industry replaced earlier superstitious prohibitions. Women featured not just as jewels in male-authored crowns but as motors of historical change: In 1703 “Mrs. Champion, the singer, performed a piece upon the harpsichord at her benefit in Lincoln’s-Inn play-house; the first feat of the kind that was announced in the newspapers” (4:633). Presumably Burney meant the fact of a benefit concert, though he may have intended to highlight the novelty of a solo harpsichord recital. At times Burney almost taunted the English readers of his General History with the image of cash flowing into a household from well-trained female singers: In 1730 “Miss Caecilia Young, a scholar of Signor Geminiani, who now sang in public for the first time, had a benefit concert at Drury-Lane play-house, pit and boxes laid together at half a guinea. This lady, afterwards the wife of Dr. Arne, with a good natural voice and fine shake, had been so well taught, that her style of singing was infinitely superior to that of any other English woman of her time” (4:653–54).
If Burney was particularly explicit about commerce in this last chapter, he nonetheless concluded his history with an image of sheer female excellence. As if arranging a piece of statuary, Burney granted an “honourable niche” to Mrs. Elizabeth Billington (née Weichsel) in his final paragraphs: “No song seems too high or too rapid for her execution. But besides these powers, . . . the natural tone of her voice is so exquisitely sweet, her knowledge of Music so considerable, her shake so true, her closes and embellishments so various, and her expression so grateful, that nothing but envy or apathy can hear her without delight” (4:681). This is to my knowledge the only occasion on which Elizabeth Billington served as the culmination to a history of Western music.
Billington’s talents notwithstanding, her significance in Burney’s A General History warrants reflection: what is going on here, discursively? Tempting as it might be to figure Burney as a champion of female achievement in its own right, such a reading fails to account for the ways praise is bound up with—even a way of making—broader points about the arts and society, music, and Burney as a writer. Commonsense explanations have some value. Burney’s praise probably helped to endear him to his female readership. But there is more to consider. Even from this rapid survey it is apparent that Burney employed women didactically to exemplify particular aspects of contemporary and recent musical culture. Praised not just for their musical excellence but for meanings that excellence held for critical and historical writing, Burney’s women are sometimes constrained and essentialized both as female ideals and as ciphers of modernity. His lavish, if on occasions generic, praise of female musicians is of interest to feminist criticism but unlikely to satisfy feminist desire.
THE INDEXICAL THEORY OF WOMAN
Burney’s historiography was informed by the then fashionable but contentious view that the history of a civilization is, in essence, a history of its women, or rather, a history of how its women were treated by men. In an article from 1985 on Enlightenment historiography Sylvana Tomaselli styled this the “indexical theory of woman.”9 Tomaselli found in the indexical theory an equation of women with culture and order. This was at odds with what she reported as a dominant assumption of twentieth-century feminism, that women are associated with irrationality and cultural chaos. The “indexical theory” of the Enlightenment, she argued, enshrined the opposite view, not woman as Other but as the civilized and civilizing center. The idea was that the position of women in society provides an absolute measure of its degree of progress: simply put, the further a society travels from the primitive, the more freedom it accords women to develop their intellectual and artistic potential. In his History of Women (1779) William Alexander observed: “Women among savages [are] condemned to every species of servile, or rather, of slavish drudgery; [we] shall as constantly find them emerging from this state, in the same proportion as we find the men emerging from ignorance and brutality, and approaching to knowledge and refinement; the rank, therefore, and condition, in which we find women in any country, mark out to us with the greatest precision, the exact point in the scale of civil society.”10
The conceit circulated well beyond Britain. In an article from 1789 one W. de la Bossiere Chambor expounded patriotically on “the respect and esteem of ancient Germans for the women of their nation.” To treat women as slaves is a sign of barbarism, he affirmed, marshaling
