A Georgian Pageant. Frank Frankfort Moore
Mr. Seward, and a certain Italian musician, a vocalist as well as a performer on the violin and that new instrument which was at first called the fortepiano, then the pianoforte, and later on simply the piano. This person's name was Gabrielli Piozzi.
Such were the harmonious elements which Dr. Burney proposed to bring together for the gratification of Mr. Fulk Greville and his wife. Mr. Greville was an amateur of some little capacity, and he had certainly at one time been greatly interested in music. He had paid £300 to Burney's master, the celebrated Dr. Arne, who composed in the masque of “Alfred” the rousing anthem known as “Rule Britannia,” for the cancelling of Burney's indentures as an apprentice to the “art of musick,” and had taken the young man into his own house in a capacity which may best be described as that of entertaining secretary. Dr. Burney may therefore have thought in his wisdom that, should Johnson be in one of his bearish moods and feel disinclined to exhibit his parts of speech to Mr. Greville, the latter would be certain of entertainment from the musicians. This showed forethought and a good working knowledge of Dr. Johnson. But in spite of the second string to the musician's bow the party was a fiasco—that is, from the standpoint of a social entertainment; it included one incident, however, which made it the most notable of the many of the Burney parties of which a record remains.
And what records there are available to any one interested in the entertainments given by Dr. Burney and his charming family at that modest house of theirs, just round the corner from Sir Joshua Reynolds' larger establishment in Leicester Fields! Hundreds of people who contributed to make the second half of the eighteenth century the most notable of any period so far as literature and the arts were concerned, since the spacious days of Elizabeth, were accustomed to meet together informally at this house, and to have their visits recorded for all ages to muse upon. To that house came Garrick, not to exhibit his brilliance as a talker before a crowd of admirers, but to entertain the children of the household with the buffooning that never flagged, and that never fell short of genius in any exhibition. He was the delight of the schoolroom. Edmund Burke and his brother, both fond of conversation when oratory was not available, were frequently here; Reynolds came with many of his sitters, and found fresh faces for his canvas among his fellow-guests; and with him came his maiden sister, feeling herself more at home with the simple Burney circle than she ever did with the company who assembled almost daily under her brother's roof. Nollekens, the sculptor; Colman, the dramatist and theatre manager, who was obliged to run away from London to escape the gibes which were flung at him from every quarter when Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer, which he had done his best to make a failure, became the greatest success of the year; Cumberland, the embittered rival of Goldsmith, who was the person who gave the solitary hiss during the first performance of the same play, causing the timid author to say to the manager on entering the playhouse, “What is that, sir—pray, what is that? Is it a hiss?” To which Colman replied, “Psha! sir, what signifies a squib when we have been sitting on a barrel of gunpowder all night?”
These were among the notabilities; and the “curiosities” were quite as numerous. The earliest of Arctic voyagers, Sir Constantine Phipps, who later became Lord Mulgrave, put in an appearance at more than one of the parties; and so did Omai, the “gentle savage” of the poet Cowper, who was brought by Captain Cook from the South Seas in the ship on which young Burney was an officer. The sisters, who, of course, idolised the sailor, sat open-mouthed with wonder to hear their brother chatting away to Omai in his native language. Upon another occasion came Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller, who told the story of how steaks were cut from the live ox when needed by the inhabitants of one region. He was immensely tall, as were some of his stories; but though extremely dignified, he did not object to a practical joke. Another person of great stature who visited the Burneys was the notorious Count Orloff, the favourite of the Empress Catherine of Russia; and from the letters of one of the young people of the household one has no difficulty in perceiving with what interest he was regarded by the girls, especially since the report reached them that he had personally strangled his imperial master at the instigation of his imperial mistress.
These are but, a few names out of the many on the Burneys' visiting list. Of course, as regards musical artists, the house was the rendezvous of the greatest in London. While the opera-house in the Haymarket was open there was a constant flow of brilliant vocalists to these shores, and the young people had many opportunities of becoming acquainted with the ignorance, the capriciousness, the affectations, and the abilities which were to be found associated with the lyric stage in the eighteenth century, as they are in the twentieth. Among the prime donne who sang for the Burneys were the Agujari—a marvellous performer, who got fifty pounds for every song she sang at the Pantheon—and her great but uncertain rival, Gabrielli. The former, according to Mozart, who may possibly be allowed to be something of a judge, had a vocal range which was certainly never equalled by any singer before or after his time. She won all hearts and a great deal of money during her visit to London, and she left with the reputation of being the most marvellous and most rapacious of Italians. Gabrielli seems to have tried to make up by capriciousness what she lacked in expression. Her voice was, so far as can be gathered from contemporary accounts, small and thin. But by judiciously disappointing the public she became the most widely talked of vocalist in the country. Then among the men were the simple and gracious Pacchierotti—who undoubtedly became attached to Fanny Burney—Rauzzini, and Piozzi.
The Burneys' house was for years the centre of the highest intellectual entertainment to be found in London, and the tact of the head of the household, and the simple, natural manners of his daughters, usually succeeded in preventing the intrusion of a single inharmonious note, in spite of the fact that a Welsh harpist named Jones had once been among the visitors.
But upon the occasion of this “command” party, when Greville was to meet Johnson, and the latter had dressed himself with that extreme care which we suspect meant that he tied up his hose, and put on a wig the front of which had not yet been burnt away by coming in contact with his lighted candle, Burney's tact overreached itself. Mr. Greville may have felt that the Thrales had no business to be of the party, or Johnson may have gained the impression that Burney's old patron was anxious to play the same part, in an honorary sort of way, in regard to himself. At any rate, he refused to be drawn out to exhibit his conversational powers to a supercilious visitor; and after a brief space of time he turned his back upon every one and his face to the fire, and there he sat, greatly to the discomfiture, no doubt, of his host. In a very short time a gloom settled down upon the whole party. Mr. Thrale, stiff and reserved, was not the man to pull things together. He sat mute on his chair, making no advance toward Mr. Greville, and Mr. Greville had probably his chin in the air, having come to the conclusion that Dr. Johnson's powers as a conversationalist had been greatly overrated by rumour.
It was when all hope of sociability had vanished that Dr. Burney, who, when a church organist, may have had occasion to cover up the shortcomings of the clergyman by a timely voluntary, begged Signor Piozzi to oblige the company with a song. But Piozzi was a forlorn hope. He was the last man in the world to save the situation. Had he been a vocalist of the calibre of Pacchierotti he could have made no headway against the funereal gloom that had settled down upon the party.
Piozzi had a sweet and highly trained voice, though some years earlier he had lost its best notes, and he sang with exquisite expression; but when playing his own accompaniment, with his back turned to his audience, he was prone to exaggerate the sentiment of the music until sentiment became lost in an exuberance of sentimentality.
This style of singing is not that to which any one would resort in order to dissipate a sudden social gloom. As the singer went on the gloom deepened.
It was just at this moment that one of those ironic little imps that lurk in wainscot nooks looking out for an opportunity to influence an unconscious human being to an act which the little demon, seeing the end of a scene of which mortals only see the beginning, regards with sardonic glee, whispered something in the ear of Mrs. Thrale, and in an instant, in obedience