come see my lair with its hundreds of skulls

ITS HAPPENING AGAIN

when i found out about linda kelly's book "susanna, the captain, and the castrato" i was like oh shit. beaten at my own game?? but luckily a) it's mostly nonfiction, only a little fiction; and b) it's bad in the way that only something written by an upper-class english person with not a single marble of self-awareness can be bad

pacchierotti's relationship with his female followers might be considered an early example of "fan culture" in that a lot of singers from this era were idealized by women who had little personal contact with them and who could freely express affection because there was no risk of anything actually happening. but also because it was a social circle where a bunch of women in their 20s were blowing off eligible men because they were more interested in talking to one another about a eunuch with social anxiety

the trajectory of susan burney's life is just very sad. her older sister was a novelist and got pretty famous for that, her father was a historian, and she made this massive contribution to music history but had absolutely no idea. and she married a man who unfortunately turned out to be abusive and moved her and her children to ireland where she ended up very isolated even by letter. she described herself as "a person most forgot" and then her chronic illness (recurrent tuberculosis infections) got much worse and she died on the road trying to go back to england to visit her sister when she was in her 40s. her family blamed the husband for killing her because the stress he put her through probably made her sicker and then he went off to become a philandering alcoholic. but the most detailed slice of her life we have is this witty, vivacious portrait of a young woman at the opera mooning over the singer she idolized and rubbing elbows with all sorts of interesting characters. and so many years later it feels like that part of her life is preserved in amber because it's the part people have read and analyzed over and over. like she'll always be young and healthy and alive, and in her london it's always the winter of 1780 and she'll never meet captain phillips or leave the city or die. anyway moral of the story is go to the opera and don't marry a sailor

it's historical/biographical fiction :)

in one corner we have SUSAN BURNEY, daughter of music historian charles burney and massive opera fan. her contribution to history is a collection of letters and journals historians salivate over because they're the most detailed source on opera in late 18th century london that we have, and from someone who was both passionate and critical. a lot of people went to the opera as a social event, but susan loved the music, spoke italian, and went to a lot of rehearsals and private events. her account of the 1779-1780 season is such a thorough and interesting boots-on-the-ground look at what it was like to be part of that "scene" and you've got all these other super notable figures from the time just wandering in and out of her life.

in the other corner, GASPARO PACCHIEROTTI, superstar soprano castrato and first man at king's theatre haymarket during the 1779-1780 opera season. pacchierotti was a shy, self-effacing person despite his immense fame. he was also very close with the burney family, and seems to have taken a shine to susan in particular. susan wrote a LOT about the conversations they had so she could share them with her sister fanny.

people have speculated about the nature of their relationship, but it's clear that susan had a huge crush on him and that he, at the very least, entertained this, since he could hardly have missed it and came by to visit her at home as often as he could (which would probably have been interpreted as explicit courtship if he'd been literally anyone else). susan records that he once called her "my dear", though she quickly saves face for him by reassuring fanny that it must have slipped out by accident. it's entirely possible that they had feelings for one another that were frustrated by the fact that there was no way in hell they could do anything about it without becoming pariahs.

in addition to that, there are a lot of super interesting bits of drama just hinted at. fanny was in the habit of blacking things out when a letter contained something she thought might damage her family's reputation. why did she feel the need to censor parts of susan's conversations with pacchierotti? how might the relationship between the two have been impacted by the knowledge that just a few years earlier, a different castrato had married an irish girl, resulting in a huge ugly scandal that ended in their divorce? the opera house's impresario was an unreliable scumbag who was also really charismatic; what the fuck was his problem? what did the duke of cumberland do to pacchierotti that was apparently super offensive but that nobody actually wrote down?

and then all of this leads up to the gordon riots, which susan also witnessed firsthand and wrote about!

anyway i think all of this is hugely interesting and lends itself well to elaboration and speculation in novel form. #myrpf

i guess this is what i’m doing with this blog now

(with a tumblr accent) hey

i love an incident whose details have not survived. or a letter that has since been lost, or a conversation that was not recorded. there are so many things we can imagine. thru the veil of tha past 🤭