The Early Reception of Mozart's Operas in London: Burney's Missed Opportunity

Early in 1789, Charles Burney declined a chance to purchase the score of an unnamed Mozart opera, offered to him by Franz Anton Weber, the composer’s uncle-in-law, in an unsolicited letter from Hamburg. For several years, Weber had been active in supplying new Viennese repertoire to northern cities such as Uppsala, Hannover and Hamburg, but in a career change, he decided to launch an itinerant opera troupe. Among the family members employed in this company was Franz Anton’s daughter Jeanette, who, he claimed, had been a pupil of Mozart and her aunt Aloysia Lange. In the light of Burney’s missed opportunity, my paper re-visits the well-researched story of Mozart reception at the King’s Theatre in the late 1780s.