The Grand Tour, that ill-defined rite of passage which for two centuries allowed young gentlefolk to experience the cultural legacies of the Mediterranean, offers up a literature with rich pickings for the musical historian. These travelogues are significant not just for what they tell us of music abroad but also, by implication, for what they tell us of the music the writers knew at home. When in 1770 Charles Burney heard the strident voice of a Neapolitan ‘counter-tenor […] one of the most powerful I ever heard – it made its way through the whole band [numbering a hundred] in the loudest and most tumultuous parts of the choruses’, he was unwittingly telling us as much about English performance practice as Italian.

Granted, for centuries men had made passing reference to music they heard abroad. But invariably these comments were written by professionals, and freighted with strong (if unspoken) agendas: a cleric writing for members of his order, or an ambassador reporting to his patron, might note a style of singing, but with the implication that it would (or more often would not) be desirable at home. Unravelling the objective ear from the subjective mind in these cases is never easy. But from the seventeenth century onwards listeners experienced foreign music in a spirit of relative naivety.