ABSTRACT
Charles Burney's public veneration of old music including that of Handel cannot have been entirely a pretence. His backward-looking obsession where opera was concerned - the reason Weber associates him with the movement for ancient music - is certainly genuine. Burney continues to be discussed in scholarly literature as both a progressive and a champion of Haydn and the modern style and 'a professed Handelian who had publicly maintained that the master's works "were so long the models of perfection in this country, that they may be said to have formed our national taste'". The coexistence of ancient and modern sympathies in this individual can serve to undermine the perception of a pervasive ancient-modern quarrel. One of Burney's characteristic ways of dealing with uncomfortable subjects involved humour. To those accustomed to seeing the late eighteenth century in terms of an ancient-modern polarization, Burney seems out of place in the ancient camp alongside his bitter enemies Jones and Hawkins.
