First published in French in 1887 and translated into its more well-known English version in 1889, “A Wicked Voice” is dedicated to amateur singer and festival organizer (and subject of a biography by Rosa Newmarch) Mary Wakefield.
A ghost story narrated by would-be Wagnerian composer Maestro Magnus, the narrative reflects Lee’s fascination with the gender ambiguity and supposed power of the castrato’s voice, interest in 18th-century Italian musical and architectural anecdotes, disdain for Wagnerian music drama, and psychological theories about the emotional influence of particular artistic experiences. Magnus, on a working holiday and cure in Venice, is asked to lecture his fellow foreign guests on Baroque music. After he mocks the stories of musical skill and murder attributed to castrato singer Balthasar Cesari, popularly known as Zaffirino, Magnus finds himself gradually overwhelmed not just by a potential sighting of Zaffirino’s ghost but by the sound of his music. The trans-historical dimension of Zaffirino’s and Magnus’s interactions echo some of Lee’s nonfiction accounts of hearing old music or looking at old paintings, as well as the potentially genderbending and homoerotic reading of the castrati. (Magnus’s repeated insistence that it is the music of the 18th century that is decadent and immoral also mocks his ignorance of similar criticisms of Wagner’s works and the emergent queer Wagnerian subcultures at Bayreuth and elsewhere!)
“A Wicked Voice” (along with the rest of the stories in Lee’s anthology Hauntings) can be read here on Project Gutenberg.