Published in the British Quarterly Review in 1880 (the same year as Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy), “The Art of Singing, Past and Present” outlines Lee’s perspective on what she perceived as a lost musical tradition. Although she never mentions the word “castrato” and only briefly alludes to the reasons for a particular style of 18th-century vocal techniques dying out, this is clearly a working out of some of the ideas about music history, connections and disconnections between centuries past and the present moment, and the power of the voice that would find fictional expression in Zaffirino’s ghostly performances and Magnus’s railing against the decadence of eighteenth-century opera in “A Wicked Voice.”
I find Lee’s relationship to biography here especially thought-provoking. While much of her fiction and nonfiction deals with individual reactions to art, she comes across as dismissive of biographers of individual singers:
There have been technical manuals, and aesthetical disquisitions, and romantic rhapsodies, and biographical imbecilities; but there has been no history of singing. A great amount of useless detail has been ferreted out concerning the character and lives of singers, but not the most rudimentary outlines have been sketched of the character and life of the art of singing.
Vernon Lee, “The Art of Singing, Past and Present,” British Quarterly Review 72 (1880): 184.
Despite this dismissal (which seems at times to be more of a critique of existing scholarship for not discussing music according to her very particular psychological, aesthetic, and historical interests), Lee nonetheless clearly needs the lives of singers–accounts of their training, their abilities, and their reception by audiences–in order to construct her ideas around musical aesthetics, historical sensibilities, and the psychological power of the arts.
To read the full article, see a scanned copy available via HathiTrust here.