Vernon Lee’s first published book-length work, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880; 2nd ed. 1907/8) represents the culmination of her youthful study in and fascination with Italian Baroque history and culture. Although music is by no means the book’s sole focus, Lee’s interest in opera (especially works performed by castrati) and the idea of reconstructing a lost musical past (also present in “The Art of Singing, Past and Present” and “A Wicked Voice”) are definitely on full display.
One element of Lee’s historical narrative that is particularly useful for thinking about musicology as a form of literature is her imaginative entry into the section on music. She imagines leading the reader through a conservatory, looking at portraits of long-dead composers and performers:
The practising pupils are not here, nor is any other living person beside ourselves; but all around is a crowd of dead musicians, members of the most famous Philharmonic Academy, in purple and lilac, and brocade and powder, who look down upon us from the walls. Only here and there do we recognize some well-known figure—Handel, majestic in blue plush and a many-stories peruke; Gluck, coarse, bright, and flushed, in a furred cloak; Haydn, pale, grey, willow-like, bending over a meagre spinet; Mozart, sweet and dreamy, with the shadow of premature death already upon him–; around them are a host of others, forgotten and unknown, their contemporaries, their masters, their friends, their rivals, and perhaps their successful rivals. Very solemn and quaint they mostly are, those ladies with prodigious beribboned haycocks on their heads, those fiddlers in dressing-gowns and periwigs, those prim chapel-masters seated by their harpsichords, and those dapper singers with one hand on their music roll and the other on their sword-hilt, very solemn and quaint, and almost droll, but not without something that awakens sadness. There is sadness in the dignified, thoughtful composers, looking as if the world still rang with the sound of their music—music not heard for a century; there is sadness in the dandified singers, whose names have long been forgotten, but whose eyes are upturned and whose lips are parted, as if they still thrilled and delighted those that have been dead a hundred years: it is a world of feeling extinct and genius forgotten, a world separated from ours by a strange indefinable gulf.
Vernon Lee, Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, 2nd edition (Chicago: McClurg, 1908), 105-106.
This gulf between past and present was a major concern in Lee’s engagement with the unknown and unknowable past. In the preface to the book’s second edition, she described her initial reticence to actually listen to the music that so enthralled her, worrying that it might “turn out hideous” (Lee, xlviii) and instead “overhearing” it from the garden while her mother played the piano. One wonders how much this notion of “overhearing” shaped Lee’s approach to musical listening over the decades.
The first and second editions of Eighteenth Century can be read in full via the Internet Archive.