ABSTRACT
The Magdalen/Diego character in Ariadne in Mantua finds its echo, in Lee’s aesthetics, in the figure of Orpheus. In her essay ‘Orpheus in Rome’ in Althea: a Second Book of Dialogues on Aspirations and Duties (1894), Lee explores the aesthetic value of music and sculpture via the dialogic exchange between a fictive self, ‘Baldwin’, and a close circle of friends based loosely on Lee’s own, all of whom had appeared some years earlier in her book, Baldwin: Being Dialogues on Aspirations and Duties (1886).2 In this essay, Baldwin first appears at an opera where he is discussing his current jaded responses to those cultural pursuits that had formerly given him pleasure: once moved by the music of Gluck, Baldwin ‘doesn’t care any longer for old music, any more than he cares – really and actively – for antique sculpture’ (Lee 1894, 56). Yet Gluck’s music, and more particularly the eighteenth-century castrato Gaetano Guadagni, who first played the title role in Orfeo ed Euridice (1762), remain an insistent memory.3 As Baldwin says, ‘It’s curious … that one of the few remaining shreds of my old musical lore … one of the few impressions remaining to me from my eighteenth-century days should happen to be that of the original singer of this very opera-the man for whom Gluck composed his Orpheus’ (Lee 1894, 51).4
