In 1781 William Thomas Beckford (1760–1844) inherited a vast colonial fortune built on West Indian sugar and slavery. To mark the occasion, his guardians commissioned a cantata from Venanzio Rauzzini (with words by Girolamo Tonioli) and enlisted the renowned castrati Gasparo Pacchierotti and Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci to perform it. More than a simple panegyric, Il tributo was a thinly veiled attempt at “straightening out” the young man’s perceived effeminacy and his apathy over the business of empire, qualities that were all the more problematic in light of his white West Indian ancestry. The performance of Il tributo, I argue, was a critical moment of social initiation in which cultural norms and structures relating to English masculinity were reinforced and ultimately destabilized.

This article unravels the threads between Beckford’s auditory intimacy with the castrato voice and his tenuous hold on the signifiers of Englishness. It takes Il tributo as the point of departure for exploring voice, race, and empire in late eighteenth-century Britain, imagining Beckford’s experience of listening to Il tributo as a practice of Camp, through which he sought to negotiate his place within the British Empire. “Camp” here refers to the sensibility glossed by Susan Sontag in 1964 as a quality of failed seriousness under extravagant circumstances, though its roots are bound up with eighteenth-century Britain’s global-colonial ambitions. What I term “Camp aurality” was the result of Beckford’s fixation with the castrato voice, or melophilia, and had the power to dethrone the cantata’s moral seriousness. While the performance of Il tributo ultimately failed to enforce imperial proscriptions regarding race and sex, it remains an ambivalent but instructive sonic artifact of the British planter class at the summit of its power.

With his latest run at Venice’s Teatro San Benedetto come to an end, the renowned castrato Gasparo Pacchierotti was contemplating his next move. In a letter of March 1781 to his friend and admirer William Beckford in Paris, the singer mused, “I have finished my duties and would eagerly fly to your side without the help of the hippogriff, if I could, then continue the journey with you to London, but the engagement to which I’m already committed in Mantua prevents it, so the moment I yearn for must wait until the summer.”1 The hippogriff is a reference to Ariosto’s epic Orlando furioso (1516), in which it carries the brave knight Ruggiero to the four corners of the earth. For eighteenth-century readers, the legendary creature represented a species of enchantment designed for a global age, though as the unlikely offspring of a griffin and a mare, it also symbolized inescapable bodily difference.2 It was a fantastic birth issuing from a timeless and exotic land—much the same role as was played by the Italian castrato in England. Pacchierotti was familiar with that role, having recently enjoyed two successful seasons (1778–80) at the King’s Theatre in London. Now back in his native Italy for less than a year, he was already being urged to “relinquish [the] journey to Mantua & return without delay, to England.”3 It was an easy request for Beckford to make: as one of the wealthiest commoners in Europe, the young milord surely failed to grasp the need for a working musician to honor his professional obligations. Pacchierotti may have rejected a flight of fancy in favor of his Italian public, but Beckford was wrapping up his Grand Tour and wanted one last souvenir. He would have it by summer, with or without magical help.

In August Pacchierotti settled at Fonthill Splendens, the Beckford estate in Wiltshire, to begin a working vacation. He was eventually joined by another famed castrato singer, Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, to premiere a new work in honor of Beckford’s twenty-first birthday. On Saturday, September 29, the pair presented Il tributo, a short cantata by Venanzio Rauzzini, another eminent castrato (though recently retired from the stage) and now composer. Today, neither the score nor its original (Italian) libretto remain extant; Il tributo survives only in the form of an English translation (“from the Original italian of Sig. girolamo tonioli”) published as a memento for the occasion.4 However it sounded when sung in Italian, someone evidently considered its message important enough to be set down permanently in its patron’s native language. Over seven pages, two Arcadian rustics named Philenus and Thirsis (sung by Pacchierotti and Tenducci, respectively) recount for Beckford the virtues of his parents and remind him of his duty to king and country. What Beckford described as a “little opera composed upon the occasion” was in fact an artistic and logistical feat that brought together some of the best-known singers in Europe and some of the biggest musical names in England—violinists Johann Peter Salomon and Giuseppe Soderini, cellist Giacobbe Cervetto, and keyboard virtuosi John Burton and Mary Jane Guest, among others—for a dazzling coming-of-age party.5 Though beyond the means of many aristocrats, the cost of such a spectacle must have seemed eminently reasonable for the music-obsessed youth so enamored of the castrato voice and about to inherit a massive fortune built on sugar and slavery.

Though Beckford never set foot on Jamaican soil, his family had presided over the island for generations as “sugar barons” in a global empire, shaping the colony’s economic, political, and racial systems to their benefit. Upon gaining full control of his inheritance, he would claim ownership of more than two thousand enslaved Afro-Caribbean people toiling across twenty-two thousand acres of sugar cane in Jamaica.6 To be “as wealthy as a West Indian,” as the saying went, was to have unprecedented access to capital attainable only through the sugar industry. But with West Indian wealth came a social hazard—the racialized taint of chattel slavery and the tropical climate in which it flourished—that made the money less than completely respectable, if not less spendable. Consequently, metropolitan Britons often considered members of the nouveau riche planter class—interchangeably called West Indians or white Creoles—to be less than fully English, whether at home or abroad. “Creole” here refers not to mixed-race parentage (as in modern American usage) but rather to a person of European descent born or living in the West Indies.7 British consternation over the social position and influence of white Creoles was therefore predicated on a contemporary understanding of “human variety” that was not principally located in skin color but readily perceived via temperament, civility, and other sociocultural distinctions such as clothing and religious practice. As a means of measuring and defining the nuances of human variety, conventional wisdom about the effect of climate on the body had constituted a major system of race-making since classical antiquity; in the eighteenth century, it fueled colonial anxiety regarding British settlers in the extreme climates of the East and West Indies. As Roxann Wheeler has shown, well into the eighteenth century racial difference was largely correlated to the classical notion of complexion, a holistic category including coloring, mental disposition, and overall health that resulted from the interaction of regional climate and medical humors.8 Neither black-skinned nor of African descent, white West Indians nevertheless underwent a process of racialization within metropolitan Britain that left them occupying an indefinite zone outside modern whiteness, an emergent category that they themselves had pioneered in order to distinguish themselves from those they enslaved. Not unlike the Italian castrato in Britain, the white Creole occupied a fraught social position contingent upon a combination of geography and gender performance, both serving as proxies in a culture war over the nation’s desire for global dominance and racial homogeneity.

Beckford’s father and namesake had embodied (and envoiced) such concerns by retaining his oft-mocked West Indian accent and his nouveau riche manners even as he ascended from alderman to Member of Parliament and eventually Lord Mayor of London. Money had bought him a first-rate education, political influence, and an advantageous marriage, but it could not erase his Creole origins. His son, on the other hand, was born in England to Maria Hamilton, who descended from the Scottish Earls of Abercorn, insulating him from the harshest anti-Creole sentiments. The younger Beckford showed no interest in his connection to Jamaica and, until recently, posterity had relegated it to a biographical footnote.9 His lasting infamy stems instead from the accusations of sodomy that irreparably damaged his public standing as well as from the collections of art and architectural follies into which he sank his fortune. In his study of white self-fashioning during this period, however, Simon Gikandi reads in Beckford’s compulsive collecting a desire to distance himself from the very system of chattel slavery that enabled his voracious cultural consumption. In his estimation, “colonial origins aggravated Beckford’s sense of cultural isolation and alienation as much as his sexuality and behavior did.”10 Despite his deep ties to the metropolitan culture of taste, the shadow of transatlantic slavery could not be shed.

Following Gikandi’s lead, I take Rauzzini and Tonioli’s Il tributo to be one more thread tying Georgian London’s beau monde to the violence of colonial slavery. What made the cantata so unique (and thus the crux of my argument) was its didactic tone, calling on its subject and patron to follow the allegedly upright example of his late father, a prolific slave owner and political schemer. The libretto’s emphasis on heteropatriarchal norms even led one of Beckford’s more fanciful biographers to believe that it “must have been written by Mrs Beckford herself,” who “insisted on a castrato’s warning to a son all too prone to project himself in public as an honorary castrato.”11 More likely, Tonioli was working from guidelines provided by his mother or by another guardian concerned for the young man’s future.12 Whatever the case, Il tributo reads like someone’s grandiose attempt to “straighten out” Beckford’s perceived effeminacy and his apathy with regard to business and politics, qualities all the more problematic in light of his Creole ancestry and the colonial source of his wealth. But as I argue below, the urgency of the cantata’s message in performance was ultimately at odds with the vocal erotics of its medium in the singers Pacchierotti and Tenducci.

In this article, I unravel the threads between Beckford’s auditory intimacy with the castrato voice (what I classify as melophilia, or desire for musical voice) and his tenuous hold on the signifiers of Englishness. Turning to his letters, I theorize Beckford’s mode of engagement with Il tributo as a practice of Camp through which he could hold in tension the contradictory meanings of the cantata (as both written work and live musical performance) that heralded his rite of social initiation. In having recourse to Camp, I invoke a mode of aestheticism that is notoriously difficult to define but lucidly articulated in Susan Sontag’s influential “Notes on Camp” (1964) as a quality of failed seriousness on an outrageous scale, sensible to those (“mainly homosexual”) who have what she terms a particular “way of seeing.”13 To inhabit the demimonde of Camp is to sustain a love for the artificial and the unnatural and to believe that the character of a person or thing is wholly discoverable at its surface. As a mainstream cultural phenomenon, Camp probably reached its saturation point around the mid-twentieth century, though several critics and scholars trace its origins as a niche sensibility back to the long eighteenth century. In a recent special issue of the journal Aphra Behn Online, for example, editors Ula Klein and Emily Kugler hearken back to the era as “a special moment in which the camp sensibility crystallized”; for Sontag, “the origins of Camp taste” were likewise to be found in the eighteenth-century vogue for, among other things, “Gothic novels, Chinoiserie, caricature, [and] artificial ruins.”14 Consistent with that world of reference, my analysis of Georgian Camp attends to the global reach of the British Empire, encompassing the artifice of Orientalism, the melodrama of the Scottish Highlands, and the exaggerations of Italian opera seria. Thus, I take Camp as an artifact of colonial modernity, an aesthetic of the fantastic and the foreign that constitutes to varying degrees the non-normative, the un-masculine, and the queer.15 It functions in my argument as a theoretical prism that refracts both coloniality and queerness to reveal Beckford’s unique “way of hearing” castrato song. “The whole point of Camp,” explains Sontag, “is to dethrone the serious.…More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’”16 But if, as I propose, Beckford’s Camp aurality challenged the cantata’s serious moral imperatives, it did so at the expense of his standing in elite English society.

The Georgian era (1714–1837) was a transformative time for the newly minted Kingdom of Great Britain. As historian Linda Colley has shown, it witnessed the gradual emergence of a coherent British identity out of shared anti-Catholic and anti-French values and a sense of cultural and racial superiority over colonial outsiders.17 Commercial growth and imperial expansion during this period also forced Britons to reevaluate social codes governing behavior and identity, especially those relating to the crisis of masculinity. Then as now, definitions of the masculine (and proposed solutions to its deterioration) often began and ended by condemning the effeminate, the meaning of which gradually shifted during this period from an overattachment to women or womanly pursuits (i.e., a lack of manly vigor) toward male-male attraction and sodomy.18 Polemicists found effeminacy in everything from modern consumer culture to foreign manners and, most alarmingly, a tamer society producing soft boys with excess sensibility. Anathema to the national character, effeminacy blurred the boundaries separating the free and hardy spirit of Britain from the decadence, self-indulgence, and tyranny endemic to Catholic Europe and the Orient. Little surprise, then, that many of these faults were associated with Italian opera.19 Simultaneously, a new masculine ideal was taking shape, one founded not in rough-and-tumble pugnacity and rakishness but in politesse and sensibility. The “man of feeling” was more inclined toward talking at the coffeehouse than brawling at the public house.20 Nor did he shun the company of women, whose presence in polite society was generally felt to have a civilizing effect on those around them. In addition to a patriotic love for country and the liberty of the “good Protestant Kingdom,”21 this new sentimental masculinity was defined by sensitivity and self-discipline. Exemplifying Britain’s supposedly higher order of civilization, it necessitated the deep feeling believed to be intrinsic to women and often cultivated at, of all places, the opera.

Opera would prove an important hinge point in conceptions of Georgian masculinity. Music culture in England had long been laden with charges of effeminacy, but the arrival of opera seria in the early eighteenth century reignited deep cultural anxieties over foreign luxury.22 Its detractors agreed that the “wantonness” of Italian song posed a serious threat to the masculine spirit of the idealized Briton and, with it, his love of liberty. Gillen D’Arcy Wood suggests that, as it grew increasingly synonymous with opera, the Italian language came to sound “musical” and “effeminate” to “English ears.”23 Charges of effeminacy, together with fears of its threat to the nation, were explicitly and increasingly linked to the excesses of the operatic voice. For listeners to dwell on legato phrasing and melismatic passaggi at the expense of linguistic comprehensibility meant they were elevating the carnal pleasure of music over any possible moral lessons. And as the meaning and stakes of effeminacy transitioned from indexing a nation of womanish men to conjuring an empire of effete sodomites, critics found a target for moral failure in the alluring class of castrated male singers imported from Italy. Already reminiscent of the cross-dressed boys of the pre-Restoration English stage, what Roger Freitas called the “baroque” body of the castrato was condemned for enticing men to sodomitical acts.24 The indefinitely extended boyishness of castrati awakened listeners to the fleeting locus of fleshly desire while at the same time recalling the frozen marble figures of antiquity. These qualities, Jessica Peritz argues, converged in the stylized neoclassical aesthetic championed by art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, in which the castrato embodied “the fantasy of preserving beauty against the ravages of time.”25 In this sense, the musicking body of the castrato served its audience as both an object of lust and an aesthetic ideal. Of utmost importance to concerns over effeminacy and sodomy was their essential foreignness. The anonymous Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England (1728)—later reprinted in Satan’s Harvest Home (1749)—warns of men with effeminate (i.e., Italian) manners who “suffer their Souls to be sung away by the Voices of Italian Syrens.”26 Rome, the reader is reminded, “sank in Honour and Success, as it rose in Luxury and Effeminacy” thanks to the arrival of “Women Singers and Eunuchs from Asia”; the “good Protestant Kingdom” must therefore gird itself against castrato singers from Italy, whose arrival in England signaled dramatic cultural shifts that once again portended imperial decline.27 Such works betrayed a conception of national identity that was grounded in masculine gender performance, the correct forms and practices of which functioned like a racial shibboleth for Englishness, which, according to Kathleen Wilson, “had emerged by the 1760s and 1770s as a nascent ethnicity.”28 Conversely, those who left the British Isles for the West Indies had effectively relinquished their claim to culture, nation, and race—their own contrary claims notwithstanding.29 While complexion was heritable, individual bodies remained porous—not closed systems but spongy sites subject to change over a lifetime—so that as their environs changed, so too could their (and their descendants’) racial makeup.30 The tropical climate of the Torrid Zones, it was feared, would reduce erstwhile sturdy Englishmen to indolence and barbarity.31 Ultimately, the inability of white Creole men to govern themselves came to epitomize colonial effeminacy.

The supposed moral turpitude of white Creoles was further exacerbated by their place at the top of a slave society, a hierarchy that had not only enabled their concentrated wealth but also granted them power over life and death for those they held in bondage. Even if most Britons were untroubled by the wretched conditions under which enslaved Africans were forced to live and die, they nevertheless feared the prospect of absentee planters—accustomed to debauched and despotic rule—using their considerable means to enter parliament and reshape the country’s laws to their benefit. Such anxieties were fostered by a caricature of the Creole as ill-mannered and uncharitable, as seen in comedies like Samuel Foote’s The Patron (1764) and Richard Cumberland’s The West Indian (1771).32 By the end of the century, West Indian slavery conjured in the British imaginary the same unchecked despotism and decadence long associated with the Orient. Timothy Touchstone’s moralistic verse critique Tea and Sugar, or The Nabob and the Creole (1792), for example, offloads the shame of colonial exploitation of the East and West Indies onto the simplified villain types of its title. Amid a web of anxieties over consumerism, sovereignty, and identity, the pseudonymous author introduces the Creole as a racial amalgam:

Now in his native pride the Creole view,
Slavery’s Prime Minister, of swarthy hue
And sickly look; of various tints combin’d,
A true epitome of a jaundic’d mind.33

Simultaneously “swarthy” (dark) and “sickly” (pale) with a “jaundic’d [yellowing] mind,” Touchstone’s Creole exhibits a mottled complexion symptomatic of his internal degeneration. Ultimately, the marginalization of West Indians in Georgian society was a function of what Gikandi terms “white anxieties” over the preservation of English culture and Englishness.34 Their ongoing association with the sugar colonies, and the enslaved Africans upon whose forced labor they depended, made white Creoles essentially foreign, revealing the fragility of (white) racial identity outside of the metropole.

Despite a loftier pedigree and upbringing than his émigré father, engaging in the kind of effeminized excess associated with Catholic Europe would prove risky for a man like Beckford, who typified the metropolitan association between conspicuous consumption and the nouveau riche planter class. And many of his controversial behaviors—lavish spending, habitual indolence, and especially his defiance of compulsory heterosexuality—met in his love of opera and castrato song. Beckford’s writing is full of sumptuous descriptions of voice, often with an erotic focus that colors his entire practice of listening. In October 1780 he wrote from Lucca to the novelist Frances Burney, describing his reaction to the singing of their mutual friend, Pacchierotti: “[His] declamation…breathes such exalted heroism, that, forgetting my peaceful schemes, I start up, grow restless, stride about and begin to form ambitious projects.…My blood thrills in my veins, its whole current is changed and agitated. I can no longer command myself, and whilst the frenzy lasts would be willingly devoted to destruction.”35 A letter drafted two months later in Venice is more explicit still: “The night is spent in cafés and at the opera, where Bertoni’s voluptuous music, supported by the artistry of the world’s finest singer [Pacchierotti], makes me more than ever effeminate.”36

Beckford was far from the only enthusiastic auditor of Italian opera in England, and hardly alone in his devotion to Pacchierotti. Lord Mount Edgcumbe named him “the most perfect singer it ever fell to my lot to hear” and Charles Burney believed his “tone, taste, knowledge, sensibility, and expression” to be unsurpassed.37 Burney’s daughters, meanwhile, used more suggestive language to describe their reactions to the singer.38 And Lady Mary Duncan was mocked in bestial terms for the exuberance she showed toward Pacchierotti and his singing: Charles Loraine Smith’s A Sunday Concert (fig. 1) depicts her gazing lustfully at the singer, and Beckford himself wrote that she was “more preciously fond of him than a she-bear of its suckling.”39 Commentary on Beckford’s own interest in music and voice, however, has often displayed a singular prurience, no doubt fueled by the so-called “Powderham affair” that catalyzed his ultimate isolation from elite society. The scandal, which took place in late 1784, saw the twenty-four-year-old Beckford publicly accused of engaging in sodomy (and, it was implied, a relationship) with William Courtenay, future Earl of Devon, who was eight years his junior. No formal charges were brought (the penalty for which could have been death) but Beckford’s impending peerage was denied, and his social standing was irreparably damaged.40 Following the lead of his contemporaries, literary historian Andrew Elfenbein and historical biographer Linda Kelly have both claimed a direct (even causal) relationship between Beckford’s draw to the castrato voice and his widely documented same-sex desire.41 One problem with such reductive analyses is the diminished role of song, which figures as little more than a metaphor in what reads like a psychopathological sketch.

Figure 1.

Charles Loraine Smith, A Sunday Concert (1782). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Figure 1.

Charles Loraine Smith, A Sunday Concert (1782). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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In contrast to previous evaluations, I propose to take seriously Beckford’s libidinal investment in voice as a practice of melophilia, an all-consuming love (i.e., eros) for the voice in song. While the term is a twenty-first-century one, “melophilia” describes a species of desire with a much longer history. Suzanne Cusick offers a cogent model for this kind of listening in the context of Medici Florence, where a prominent citizen’s pursuit of erotic gratification led him into the apartment of Maria Vittoria Frescobaldi, a cloistered nun ranked among the best singers in the city. Upon his discovery there, Sinolfo Ottieri faced charges of “intended or consummated sexual intimacy with a consecrated virgin,” though both parties held that the encounter was not sexual but musical in nature.42 According to his friends in the elite musical circles of Florence, Ottieri was known to be a melophile who found his “primary source of pleasure” in “an erotic economy of aural and vocal exchange.”43 At the aesthetic level, then, we could say that melophilia was awakened by the virtuosic display of control and affect—embodied practices associated with breath, mouth, and throat—that had marked solo singing at least since their articulation in Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove musiche (1602). More than a passion for vocal music, song, or melody (as the Greek “melos” might seem to imply), melophilia is a mode of active, even distracting focus on the voice in action. Thus, melophilia works well to describe men like Ottieri “who spent more money on operatic and chamber singing than can be easily explained by reference to appearances or prestige,” as it “takes its delight in…the central role of the listener [and] the expression of emotions.”44 It is a form of vocal-aural exchange, grounded in the body, wherein the listener maintains control by foregrounding their own subjectivity.45 Melophilia reorients listening from a passive experience to an active choice. Ironically, the same sense of active listening overlapped with the “spiritual practice” of listening developed by elite Romans and described by Andrew Dell’Antonio as a means of combating the dangers of erotic “abandon” posed by the passive reception of music. For St. Augustine, lending too much focus to (let alone enjoying) the voice sounding the liturgy was already to sin; in the wake of post-Tridentine reforms and the creation of a professional class of virtuosic singers, what Dell’Antonio calls “active receptivity” functioned both as an affective devotional practice and a defense against the effeminizing effects of music.46 By engaging in “the new discourse about music” that positioned attentive listening as a masculine and devotional enterprise, these auditors sought to retain their agency by choosing to relinquish control—granting themselves permission to enjoy sound within reason.47

In Emily Wilbourne’s usage, melophilia also arises in relation to early modern Italy’s “melody-dominated” or operatic genres—the new monodic style of the early Seicento and the bravura and declamatory styles associated with eighteenth-century opera seria—though she puts special emphasis on the vocal arts of the castrato.48 For eighteenth-century Britons, the idea of opera was already imbued with the decadence and effeminacy of Italy; excessive love for castrato singing thus amounted to a racialized desire for the exotic pleasures of Catholic southern Europe. What Serena Guarracino glosses as the “castrated voice” had long inhabited a geographical as well as a bodily “South” in the anglophone imaginary: the mystical Italian landscape (birthplace of the castrato) and the grotesque site of the norcino’s incision (the origin of his voice).49 Such forbidden pleasures signified in relation to an imperial framework in which the world outside of England (including the rest of Great Britain) was recast as a series of cultural scavenging fields for the edification of a select few. Moreover, decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo argues that, since the eighteenth century, the imagined South has been “simultaneously constructed with the Orient” as lands of “slow speed,” and in contrast to the progress-oriented North.50 The era saw the collective schema of global climate zones remapped to reflect increasing northern European hegemony: Britain was newly centered in the temperate zones—believed to be home to the most advanced civilizations and racially superior peoples—while Italy and Greece were displaced into the southern climate regions. The former cradle of Western civilization was now only one degree removed from the Caribbean’s supposedly uninhabitable Torrid Zones.51 The result was a nebulous European South caught, from the perspective of the British Empire, in the selfsame web of coloniality (albeit in vitally different ways) as the Americas, Asia, and Africa.52

The castrated voices imported from the South were familiar enough as commodities to British consumers, but their essential foreignness kept them from fully assimilating into the national soundscape. To gorge oneself on exotic food or drink was one kind of vice unworthy of an English gentleman, gluttony sooner expected of a fatuous Italian or an unmannered Creole; overindulging in exotic voices represented its own breach of masculine conduct. As a mode of material or vibrational engagement, an intimacy between voice and ear, melophilia recalls Cusick’s flirtation with the notion that “music is sex,” a non-penetrative (but deeply embodied) avenue for mutual erotic gratification.53 Hence Beckford’s reaction to hearing soprano castrato Girolamo Crescentini: “the slender Creature of eighteen seems to possess a great deal of feeling; but the accents of Pacchierotti still vibrate in my ears and prevent their attending much to any other.”54 What begins with a suggestion of physical attraction to the body of the castrato is soon overshadowed by a lingering, embodied connection between voice and ear. And while both singers inclined stylistically toward what Martha Feldman terms the sentimental “Orfeo line,” favoring a nuanced sensibility over “flamboyant” passaggi, Pacchierotti had won the day without even being there.55 No amount of “feeling” from the handsome young Crescentini could yet match the disarmingly simple “accents” of (the older and less physically attractive) Pacchierotti, which still echoed months later in Beckford’s ear.

The queer implications of such devotional, embodied attachment to a voice were clear even to Beckford’s contemporaries, for whom such wanton displays of sentiment went beyond good taste. In the wake of the “Powderham affair” and his fall from grace, the celebrated woman of letters Elizabeth Carter mourned what she felt to be his squandered potential:

I had received an account of B—’s horrid behaviour, but did not know, till by your letter, what was become of him.…This young man at his first setting out, appeared to have such uncommon parts, and so much knowledge, that it might have been reasonably hoped, that when the coxcomb was outgrown, he would have made a very distinguished figure in society. When he afterwards so extravagantly and ridiculously addicted himself to music, all prospect of his becoming great or respectable was over.56

Although she avoids the word sodomy itself, her implications are clear. For Carter, Beckford’s “absurd and excessive fondness” for music came to constitute a kind of pathology—an addiction for which he alone is held responsible. Evidently, exceeding the appropriate displays of sentiment in the throes of melophilia was a moral transgression, too. Emerging from our vantage point as a distinctly queer practice, melophilia was directly related to the national threat of sodomy. In works like Satan’s Harvest Home, the castrato’s siren song is said to entice men to same-sex desire; for the melophile, the voice of the castrato is, itself, the enticement. (This is not to say that melophilia precludes other, overlapping forms of desire.) Lying outside the boundaries of companionate marriage and familial love, melophilia challenged the naturalization of heterosexual desire along with the reproductive logic of English masculinity.

Among the high points of Beckford’s time on the Grand Tour was his journey down the Italian peninsula to visit his mother’s relations, Sir William Hamilton and his wife, Lady Catherine, in Naples. For nearly two decades, Sir William had filled the role of British emissary to the Neapolitan court while pursuing his passion for antiquities and volcanoes; Lady Catherine, meanwhile, was a talented musician who nevertheless seemed to languish in the southern heat and the shadow of her energetic husband.57 In David Allan’s portrait of the couple, Sir William gazes at his wife, who improvises at the keyboard while Mount Vesuvius smolders over her shoulder (see fig. 2). Beckford remained with them at the Villa Angelica through the autumn of 1780, during which time he and Lady Catherine bonded over music and poetry: “Sir [William] hunts all day long with the King upon the Mountains, whilst we indulge our imaginations at home and play strange dreams upon the pianoforte.”58 In her he found a kindred spirit poised between confidante and confessor—a surrogate mother for an aimless youth abroad. Hence the frantic letter sent upon his return to Venice in December:

Should I find my langor [sic] coming on again & that I could not resist the insinuating whispers of a soft but criminal delight—I hurry to England.…Our Opera [Bertoni’s Armida abbandonata] is the most enchanting of compositions & [Pacchierotti] beyond himself; but I almost fear attending to it—Such Musick—O Heav’n it breathes the very soul of voluptuous effeminacy & has already corrupted. I believe what little remains of virtue was left in the republic. The Duo which terminates the first act is full of those childish bewitching notes that distinguish [Pacchierotti] & never fail enervating such musical creatures as me.…[W]hat would I not give for you to hear this dangerous melody & tell me again of its influence.…[W]ere it not for the [Opera I] might stand a chance of being perfectly reestablished.59

Figure 2.

David Allan, Sir William and the First Lady Hamilton in Their Villa in Naples (1770). Compton Verney via Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 2.

David Allan, Sir William and the First Lady Hamilton in Their Villa in Naples (1770). Compton Verney via Wikimedia Commons.

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His invocations of Pacchierotti evince a self-consciously effeminized practice of listening—the melophilic abandonment of self-control to the vocal erotics of the castrato—yet its tone hovers between longing for moral support and trawling for outrage from a beloved guardian. What comes through most clearly is Beckford’s lack of interest in being “reestablished” at all.

Beckford has become a touchstone of queer historiography since the poststructuralist turn of the last century, with scholars and biographers alike treating the Venice letter as a smoking gun. In her foundational work on male homosociality, Eve Sedgwick dubbed him “in some significant sense homosexual…notoriously,” while acknowledging that the “public scandal [was] created, and periodically revived, to keep his newly rich family from a peerage!”60 George Haggerty, meanwhile, has argued that Beckford’s self-fashioning forged a modern sexual identity anticipating the possibility of male “lovers,” in our contemporary sense of sexual and romantic partners.61 In both cases, Beckford’s public outing represents a watershed moment in what David Halperin has problematized as the “history of homosexuality.”62 By contrast, Max Fincher suggests that “Beckford represents a more individualist position that has resonances with a contemporary understanding of queer.”63 I follow Fincher’s lead in advocating a relatively capacious understanding of human sexuality offered by a transhistorical queerness (rather than limiting him to more contingent sexual identities such as “homosexual” or “gay”) that leaves space for Beckford’s melophilic desire while retaining the critical frisson of deviance essential to his broader self-mythologizing. Indeed, Beckford’s continual draw as a puzzling yet recognizably queer figure likely rests on what critics have read as a clear-eyed understanding of his own marginality, complete with its hallmark Camp sensibility.64

Central to any conception of Camp is the question of political alignment. Sontag’s notorious assertion that Camp is “disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical” has by this point been thoroughly debunked.65 Her reasoning (“To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content”) is nevertheless indicative of a time before the emergence of identity-based politics later in the 1960s. Sontag’s inability to imagine an explicit politics of Camp stems from her privileging the critical gaze (serendipitous discoveries of “naive” Camp) over authorial intent (“deliberate” attempts at campiness) as its “pure” form; as with novelist Christopher Isherwood’s earlier distinction between its “high” and “low” forms, true Camp necessarily lacked self-awareness at its point of origin.66 Both championed an inherent sensibility attuned to over-the-top catastrophes of artifice, but in the wake of Stonewall and the radical politics necessitated by the AIDS epidemic, critics like Mark Booth began to push back against their definition and its proliferation of mainstream “Camp fads and fancies.”67 The most vociferous challenge came in Moe Meyer’s The Politics and Poetics of Camp (1994), which brought together essays seeking to reclaim Camp as an explicitly political practice of “queer parody.”68 Rejecting what he saw as a counterfeit “pop camp” catering mostly to a straight, bourgeois public, Meyer’s ideal is not something discovered by a cadre of tasteful arbiters but a kind of underground social strategy for moving through the world, its permanent referent being an originary (and largely essentialized) homosexuality. Wrapped up in the debates over the politics of Camp, then, is the search for its origins, though by pitting the self-conscious clown against the unintentional flop, neither side provides a wholly satisfying account. We are left with the kind of synthesis provided by Fabio Cleto’s recursive but useful definition: Camp is, first, a “mode of perception” stressing the object’s “failure in performance” and the subject’s performance in perceiving it; and second, a “‘style’ of performance” that is aware of its own perception and its inevitable “failure of intentions.”69

Beckford did not have access to any explicit model of Camp. But while the eighteenth century did not yet have in circulation a notion of Camp per se, critics and scholars on both sides of the debate have retrospectively read these or similar aesthetic and performative sensibilities into the Georgian era. Sontag points to the early century’s “extraordinary feeling for artifice, for surface, for symmetry; its taste for the picturesque and the thrilling, its elegant conventions for representing instant feeling and the total presence of character—the epigram and the rhymed couplet (in words), the flourish (in gesture and in music),” while Booth singles out Beckford’s contemporary and proto-dandy, Beau Brummell.70 Hence, applying a Camp lens to Beckford’s writing promises to shed light on his sense of song and self in the empire. In his correspondence, Beckford draws himself as a kind of queer caricature—devoutly irreverent and exuberantly effeminate—and a perceptive aesthete with a canny understanding of what Sontag calls “Being-as-Playing-a-Role.”71 “Why,” he wondered in a letter to his tutor Alexander Cozens, “should I desire the applause of Creatures I despise?” Rejecting the biblical mandate to put away childish things, he “resolved to be a Child for ever” and seek only the “innocence and tranquility” of “that primaeval period when Force and Empire were unknown.”72 He similarly begged Frances Burney to “quench [any] flame” of “ambition” sparked in him by Pacchierotti’s singing: “You see how perfectly our modern Timotheus is my sovereign, and therefore as my friend advise him to change the louder tones of his harmony for such arcadian measures as persuade to the enjoyment of rural life.”73 Between its “louder tones” and “arcadian measures,” Pacchierotti’s singing sounded for Beckford at the core of the Camp penchant not for style at the expense of substance but, more accurately, for the substance of style.

In The Queer Art of Failure, Jack Halberstam describes the aesthetic of negativity surrounding certain twentieth-century queer figures for whom “failure can be a style”: “In true camp fashion, the queer artist works with rather than against failure.” Beckford inhabits something like this “ethos of resignation to failure, to lack of progress and a particular form of darkness” in focusing on his isolation, anxiety, and illness in his writing.74 Halberstam’s general focus is on contemporary artistic counternarratives, lines of rebellion that took the form of anticapitalist or anticolonial struggle—practices that hardly map onto an eighteenth-century slave owner whose profits can be traced to sugar factories at the forefront of capitalist management. Yet he also acknowledges the absurdity (if ubiquity) of the knee-jerk assumption that all queer sex is inherently revolutionary or liberatory, pondering the historiographical fate of “gays [and] lesbians who collaborate with rather than oppose politically conservative and objectionable regimes.”75 It would similarly be a mistake to assume that queer failures of desire (for example, Beckford’s melophilia) naturally lead to class solidarity or abolitionist sympathies. It follows, therefore, that Camp can just as easily support as subvert hegemonic ideologies, purposefully or indifferently. We see this in another macabre letter to Lady Hamilton, written on the threshold of Beckford’s majority, in which he altogether rejects the prospect of growing up:

At this disastrous moment, too, when every individual is abandoned to terrors and anxieties, which way can I turn myself? Public affairs I dare not plunge into. My health is far too wavering.…This whole morning I have been condemned to the perusal of Jamaica letters filled, as you may imagine, with ruin and desolation. No language can describe the situation of that unfortunate colony Savannah le Mar which has felt the force of the hurricane.…Happily for me the power of the storm and earthquake fell upon those villages in which I have least concern.…For ambitious spirits this is not the period to shrink out of the way. Danger and difficulties are their pavements. But I no longer feel myself bold enough to tread such monsters under foot. Once upon a time I fancied myself filled with ambition. I looked this very morning and could not find a grain.76

Between its melodramatic rants, the letter reveals a callous disregard for the lives of those he enslaved in the wake of a natural disaster; it also reads as a standout example of Camp self-mythologizing. Beckford’s Camp aesthetic could, in other words, disrupt modern codes of masculinity and expectations of “natural” desire while simultaneously benefitting from and upholding systems of colonial exploitation.

A major precondition for the Camp devotion to artifice was the emergence of global consumerism propelled by the lavish beau monde of Georgian Britain and supported by the Atlantic slave trade. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith argues that cultural consumption is central to the work of social distinction, with one’s sense of taste ultimately signifying one’s degree of remove from the trend-setting aristocracy.77 The irony, according to Gikandi, is that white Creoles “were the only people with enough money to drive the engine of taste, which demanded luxury and consumption, but they were also considered to be the furthest removed from good manners and politeness.”78 By constructing a personal aesthetic outside Britain’s “civilizing” temperate zone, Beckford risked drawing attention to his Creole roots, jeopardizing his place in an emergent system of white racial hegemony, but he also staked a claim among what Sontag terms Camp’s “self-elected…aristocrats of taste.”79 Hence, Elfenbein identifies Beckford’s “genius [for] consumption,” a dedication to excess that distanced the self-styled “virtuoso collector” from the industrious legacy of his father and the rational endowment of British civilization, and propelled him toward defiant failure that “freed collecting for true pointlessness.”80 And at the apex of his pointless collecting was music, and song in particular, falling under Smith’s category of “unproductive labor” as that which produces no lasting economic value. At least that other genteel collector, the bibliophile, sought out something tangible—the result of writing, printing, and bookbinding; in contrast, when the aria is finished, the melophile is left with nothing to show for their expenditure.

How might we understand Beckford’s uniquely extravagant devotion to the castrato, even as those “voices from the South” had long since made their mark on the British soundscape? As we have seen, Beckford was dedicated to the cause of eternal youth and self-mythologized as a fantastic and quasi-foreign creature. His literary persona recalled the stylized attitudes of the seria stage so associated with singers like Pacchierotti, as in his exaggerated depiction on the stage in Thomas Rowlandson’s Italian Affectation: Real Characters (fig. 3). As the eighteenth century waned, the Italian eunuch’s on- and offstage gender troubles (long among his most alluring, if controversial, qualities) grew untenable in the context of the new emphasis on rigid sexual dimorphism. In this light, Beckford’s continued desire for the musical body of the castrato gestures to the “Camp taste for the androgynous” that Sontag calls “a relish for the exaggeration of sexual characteristics and personality mannerisms.”81 Perhaps Beckford’s avid dedication to castrato song is best understood, in Isherwood’s formulation, not as “making fun of it” but “making fun out of it.”82 If the late-century castrato can be understood through the lens of Camp, though, it is not for his perceived effeminacy; on the contrary, he is often depicted, in Martha Feldman’s words, as a “fantastical exaggeration of maleness,” “an overdone male who can bleed into femaleness.”83 He represents a surplus of masculine gender signifiers enclosed in an irregularly boyish and foreign body, envoicing the power of the patriarchal order while, increasingly from mid-century, representing southern barbarity and eastern decadence. Amplified by exotic roles and frequent caricature, such connotations could, under the right circumstances, even shade a vocal and performing style from refined sentimentality into the arch, at times even gauche or grotesque sensibilities of the Orientalist and the Gothic. For that reason, Beckford’s aesthetic affinity with the castrato may have constituted the ultimate gesture of eighteenth-century Camp—an act with queer and racial implications for the colonial scion at odds with the commercial and political aspirations of family and empire.

Figure 3.

Thomas Rowlandson, Italian Affectation: Real Characters (1786–91). © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Figure 3.

Thomas Rowlandson, Italian Affectation: Real Characters (1786–91). © Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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“Of course,” Sontag reminds us, “not all seriousness that fails can be redeemed as Camp. Only that which has the proper mixture of the exaggerated, the fantastic, the passionate and the naïve.”84 Commissioning a musical work for a special occasion was not unprecedented among the monied elite of eighteenth-century Europe, but the performance of Il tributo was a pivotal moment in which cultural norms and structures relating to English masculinity were reinforced and ultimately destabilized. At first blush, the cantata (and its surrounding festivities) would seem to have been the culmination of Beckford’s social transition from boy to man. Yet, as will be shown here, the libretto betrays a deep custodial anxiety over Beckford’s failure to inhabit the proper modes of genteel English masculinity. In this respect, Tonioli’s libretto is quite different from a work like Pel giorno natalizio di Francesco I imperatore de’ romani, Metastasio’s birthday cantata for Holy Roman Emperor Francis I (r. 1745–65), which does not seek to reform its patron and lacks any references to specific people, nations, or values.85 And while bestowing symbolic or ceremonial advice on the eve of adulthood might not usually raise an eyebrow, what made Il tributo truly unique was the scale of its ambitions as both a festive event and a tool of social discipline. Here were two of the most famous singers in Europe doting on an untitled heir; indeed, the cantata acknowledges that this is no ordinary birthday, but “the happy Day, which puts our amiable Youth William, into the full Possession of his ample Inheritance.”86 Such a brazen statement could not but call to mind the conspicuous consumption expected of the planter class.

The central conceit of Il tributo is Beckford’s worthiness as a son of Britain whose outer trappings of wealth and power correspond to inner nobility. Things are set in motion by the shepherd Thirsis (Tenducci), who questions his own worthiness to take part in the proceedings:

thirsis

Wretched, abject, obscure Shepherd as I am, how can I appear—how speak—before the noble Train of Nymphs and Heroes here assembled!

philenus

Ah, little knowest thou this happy Son of a Great Father! His eminent Fame has surely reached thy Ears.

thirsis

Whose Ears has it not reached, Philenus? His great Soul shone forth in brightest Rays. In him what a Union of most valuable Qualities! Philenus, I knew him well. In him Magnanimity was conspicuous, and virtuous Principles regulated the Affections of his Heart. To his Country he ever proved himself the true Patriot; to his Family the affectionate Parent.

philenus

Wherefore then this ill-timed Tear? This our dear Youth is a Son worthy of such a Father. To his chaste Ear sweet Song (whether in heroic or pastoral Measure) is equally acceptable.87

As presented here, Beckford’s late father was not some Jamaican-born social climber with illegitimate children and a quick temper but a paragon of English masculinity. In life, his critics had ridiculed the obvious hypocrisy of championing the English working poor while enslaving thousands of Africans, but Tonioli’s biographical gloss leaves out his prominent part in the slave trade. Now, as a lodestar for his son, the alderman is remembered as a servant to the British nation, a patriarch to his wife and son, a model of regulated sensibility. Rather than enumerating their patron’s own “valuable Qualities,” however, Philenus affirms the younger Beckford’s attitude of noblesse oblige by virtue of his (vaguely) egalitarian taste. At the very least, the designations of “heroic” and “pastoral” imply the respective spheres of Italian opera seria and Scottish folk ballads in which Pacchierotti and Tenducci reigned supreme.88 The entire exchange, from the shepherd’s verbal reticence to Beckford’s “chaste Ear,” relies on listening as a metaphor for how to behave in society, prompting the question: what would it mean to listen to either genre chastely? Presumably a kind of aural self-regulation or, failing that, a sense of Augustinian shame. Yet, as Beckford was the first to admit, his ears were hewed much closer to promiscuity than to chastity, to deviance than to conformity. If, indeed, he could appreciate “heroic” and “pastoral” alike, it was only so long as they were carried by the “sweet Song” of the castrato.

Elsewhere in the cantata, the tension between on- and offstage realities plays out in moments of implied interaction between the performers and the audience. Upon surveying what the libretto names as a chorus of shepherds, for example, Philenus charges his counterpart, “Behold, what a splendid Assembly of beautiful British Nymphs! With what Joy, what Delight do they crowd round our happy Youth!”89 Perhaps these phrases were calling attention to a bit of stage business enacted by the (unnamed) shepherdesses of the chorus; or, more imaginatively, they may have referred to something taking place offstage. Thirsis looks on, for example, as Beckford’s mother “tenderly clasps our Youth in her Arms” and both singers approach their patron after he “courteously beckons” them.90 The “beautiful British Nymphs” may have been a contingent of eligible young ladies in the audience who, for the purposes of this stunt, had positioned themselves around Beckford. Such women would surely have consisted of the fairest isle’s well-bred daughters, described by historian Felicity Nussbaum as the “designated guardians of their country’s distinctive complexion.”91 As a marker of identity, “complexion” was not yet entirely reducible to—though it increasingly foregrounded—skin color. Wilson thus identifies a growing belief in “the greater aesthetic beauty of the ‘pink and white complexion,’” a racial aesthetic on display in Joshua Reynolds’s portrait of a ruddy-cheeked Beckford (fig. 4) from the following year.92 The scene of make-believe shepherds portrayed by Italian eunuchs herding real Englishwomen as brood mares suggests a dynamic display of compulsory heterosexuality as patriotic virtue and racial necessity.

Figure 4.

Joshua Reynolds, William (Thomas) Beckford (1782). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Figure 4.

Joshua Reynolds, William (Thomas) Beckford (1782). © National Portrait Gallery, London.

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And yet, for the melophile, the sensuality of voice took precedence over moralizing verse, filtering the imperatives of English masculinity through a song of Italian effeminacy. Far from the “Sensibility…most refined” that balanced feeling and reserve,93 Beckford’s “way of hearing” stretched the earnest sentimentality of Il tributo over the line of good taste into a grotesque parody and excess of sensation. Melophilia, in other words, precluded any chance of a truly “chaste Ear” and set the conditions for a Camp ear that was attuned to the gap between the intended meaning of Tonioli’s libretto and the embodied expression in Pacchierotti’s “sweet Song.” The clearest example comes at the climax of the cantata, when Philenus recounts the instructions of Beckford’s “amiable mother” to her “dear and only Son”:

Suffer me, my dear Son, to point out to you your chief Good. In every Stage of Life let your Father’s bright Example be your Guide. First, reflect, that in vain does Man pretend to conceal his Actions from the Eye of Heaven. Next, that to your Country and to your King, the strictest Loyalty is due. But, rather than any Circumstances should induce you to commit one base Action, Die, first, my Son, and your Death will be a Subject of Envy.94

Though heavy-handed, the lines neatly condense the qualities that, according to Colley, characterized the new Briton: adherence to the stark values of Protestantism over perceived Catholic depravity, patriotic self-sacrifice to the liberal monarchy of Great Britain, and avoidance of the bad behavior associated with the colonial peripheries.95 “How perfect must be that Son,” Thirsis continues, “in whom is united such maternal Advice, with such hereditary paternal Excellence!”96 For those attending the festivities at Fonthill, and indeed anyone familiar with the family’s colonial origins, the claim contradicted commonly held beliefs about the racially degenerative effects of the tropical climate on white Britons—to say nothing of the alderman’s actual character. Ultimately, the conduct outlined in Il tributo was less about emulating the father than enacting gendered and classed values that cordoned the younger Beckford off from the Jamaican source of his wealth and prestige. The disconnect arose in entrusting the message to Italian sex symbols who envoiced the indolence, decadence, and barbarism associated with their own southern climate, fracturing the cantata’s moralistic pretense. From the start, this elaborately crafted and high-stakes mythmaking was bound to collapse under the weight of its own irony.

                      * * *

In the three years following the memorable celebrations at Fonthill, Beckford married Lady Margaret Gordon, sired two children, and took a seat in parliament. But after Lady Margaret’s death in May 1786, which came on the heels of the sodomy accusations in late 1784, his family decided the time was ripe for a long-overdue visit to his sugar plantations in Jamaica. Beckford was unenthusiastic about the plan, fearing that the tropical climate would “wither [his] health away” and likely dreading the prospect of integrating himself into the planter society of his father.97 More disturbing still was the thought of encountering (and indeed hearing) the Black inhabitants he continued to enslave. Castrated voices could be indulged as luxuries from the South, but the enslaved voices of the Torrid Zones could not register in the aesthetic paradigm to which his ear was tuned.98 Sailing from England in March 1787, he disembarked at Lisbon and discontinued his journey. Beckford never made it to Jamaica, nor could he cross the psychic boundary that cordoned off his aesthetic world from the violent systems of racial slavery that funded it. Instead, he mitigated the devastating realities and expectations of empire by indulging in foreign beauty (Oriental art and antiques, Catholic-leaning architecture, and the vocal art of the castrato) financed by his colonial wealth. And he surpassed the limit of sentimental feeling—a necessary civilizing influence in moderation but, in excess, a failure of masculine proscriptions—to cultivate a Camp sensibility. Unwilling or unable to embody the “chaste Ear” ordained for him, Beckford leaned into Camp aurality as a way of listening between artifice and sincerity. While Il tributo failed to produce an ideal of English masculinity, it remains an ambivalent sonic artifact of West Indian slavery and the planter class at the summit of their power.

Earlier iterations of this paper have been presented at the Meeting of the American Musicological Society in New Orleans (2022) and the Transnational Opera Studies Conference in Paris (2019). This version is also the outcome of several smaller presentations and workshops, though I am especially indebted to Martha Feldman, Jessica Peritz, and Katelyn Hearfield, as well as this journal’s editors and anonymous reviewers, for their attentive reading and helpful suggestions.

1.

Pacchierotti to Beckford, Venice, March 3, 1781 (incorrectly dated 1782 in the collection), Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, MS Beckford c. 34, fols. 7r–8r: “Io ho terminate qui le mie incombenze, e sarei voglioso senza l’aiuto dell’Ippogrifo di volarmene al suo fianco, se potessi, indi proseguirei il viaggio con Lei sin a Londra ma l’impegno di Mantova già contratto, me’l vieta, quindi converrà differire sino l’Estate prossima il sospirato momento” (my translation). In a letter to his cousin-in-law of two weeks earlier, Beckford had similarly despaired that he could not “mount the Hippogriff and fly with my volumes [of “oriental literature”] to Naples.” Beckford to Lady Hamilton, Paris, February 20, 1781, in Lewis Melville [Lewis Saul Benjamin], The Life and Letters of William Beckford of Fonthill (London: W. Heinemann, 1910), 103.

2.

Accordingly, the hippogriff is not a winged stallion like Pegasus but a fearsome flying beast with the beak and talons of an eagle. As griffins are said to hunt horses, the hybrid creature implies the overcoming of impossible odds through love. See Colin Jager, Unquiet Things: Secularism in the Romantic Age (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 146–47. Pacchierotti portrayed the character of Ruggiero in the second production of Johann Adolph Hasse’s Il Ruggiero, in Naples in 1772. See Stephen A. Willier, “A Celebrated Eighteenth-Century Castrato: Gasparo Pacchierotti’s Life and Career,” Opera Quarterly 11 (1995): 95–121, at 111. Perhaps unintentionally, the promise of flying “without the help of the hippogriff” also echoes a line from Milton’s Paradise Regained (1671): “So saying he caught him up, and without wing / Of Hippogrif bore through the Air sublime” (4.541–42).

3.

Beckford to Pacchierotti, Paris, March 12, 1781, Bodleian MS Beckford c. 34, fol. 4v. On their time together in Italy during Beckford’s Grand Tour, see Stephen Samuel Armstrong, “Operatic Mobilities: Italian Opera as Tourist Exchange, 1770–1830” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2021), 119–59. On Pacchierotti’s first stay in London, see Stephen A. Willier, “Gasparo Pacchierotti in London: The 1779–80 Season in Susanna Burney’s ‘Letter-Journal,’” Studi musicali 29 (2000): 251–91.

4.

Girolamo Tonioli, Il tributo: A Pastoral Cantata, from the Original Italian (Salisbury: Collins and Johnson, 1781). The high proportion of lines translated and typeset as prose may suggest that, with the exception of opening and closing duets and a midway chorus, the cantata consisted mostly of recitative. A potential model for its music may be found in what the Salisbury and Winchester Journal called a “charming Terzette” programmed alongside Il tributo. “Salisbury, October 1,” Salisbury and Winchester Journal, October 1, 1781. Paul Rice suggests that the unnamed trio was “Troppo paventa e palpita” from Rauzzini’s cantata La sorpresa (1779) in view of its largely syllabic and homophonic larghetto section, which seems suited to the word-heavy libretto of Il tributo. Paul F. Rice, Venanzio Rauzzini in Britain: Castrato, Composer, and Cultural Leader (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2015), 100.

5.

Beckford to Lady Hamilton, Fonthill, October 14, 1781, in Melville, Life and Letters, 121. The following Monday, a local paper referred to the “Pastoral Cantata” as “a most elegant composition, met with universal applause” and listed several of its performers. See “Salisbury, October 1,” Salisbury and Winchester Journal, October 1, 1781.

6.

See Perry Gauci, William Beckford: First Prime Minister of the London Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 148. On the family’s ascent to power in Jamaica, see also Matthew Parker, The Sugar Barons: Family, Corruption, Empire, and War in the West Indies (New York: Walker, 2011), 132–46.

7.

The term “creole” is best distinguished in the Spanish context, in which “criollo” referred to a Spaniard born in the New World, whereas “mestizo” (like the French “métis”) denoted mixed European and indigenous American parentage. On the history of creolization in the Americas, see Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti, “Introduction: Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas,” in Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, ed. Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 1–57, at 3–7, and Trevor Burnard, “West Indian Identity in the Eighteenth Century,” in Assumed Identities: The Meanings of Race in the Atlantic World, ed. John D. Garrigus and Christopher Morris (Arlington: Texas A&M University Press, 2010), 71–87.

8.

Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 21–28.

9.

Beckford has more often been imagined in relation to the East than the West Indies, on account of his interest in Oriental art and artifacts as well as his Gothic novel The History of the Caliph Vathek (1786). On connections to his Creole ancestry, see Laurent Châtel, William Beckford: The Elusive Orientalist (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2016), 46–49.

10.

Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 133. David Hunter asserts, contra Gikandi, that Beckford’s musical consumption “was neither an attempt to escape from his economic or racial circumstances nor to disguise them.” David Hunter, “The Beckfords in England and Italy: A Case Study in the Musical Uses of the Profits of Slavery,” Early Music 46 (2018): 285–98, at 293.

11.

Timothy Mowl, William Beckford: Composing for Mozart (London: J. Murray, 1998), 108.

12.

This might perhaps have been his godfather, William Pitt, Lord Chatham, who had previously shown concern over his godson’s moral education by forbidding him a copy of Arabian Nights and ordering the destruction of a set of “Oriental drawings.” See Laurent Châtel, “The Lures of Eastern Lore: William Beckford’s Oriental ‘Dangerous Supplements,’” XVII–XVIII: Revue de la Société d’études anglo-américaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles 67 (2010): 127–44, at 133. On Tonioli’s career as a poet and musician in London, see Susanna Burney, The Journals and Letters of Susan Burney: Music and Society in Late Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Philip Olleson (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012), 86, 167.

13.

While I am aware of the shortcomings of Sontag’s essay, which I discuss below, it nevertheless remains a fruitful point of departure for my argument, and I follow her convention of treating “Camp” as a proper noun. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964), in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader, ed. Fabio Cleto (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 53–65.

14.

Ula Lukszo Klein and Emily MN Kugler, “Eighteenth-Century Camp Introduction,” in “Eighteenth-Century Camp,” special issue, Aphra Behn Online: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts 1640–1830 9, no. 1 (2019): 1–10, at 1; Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 56, note no. 13. On critically applying Camp to instances of eighteenth-century cultural production and consumption, see Klein and Kugler, “Eighteenth-Century Camp Introduction.”

15.

On the relationship between modernity and coloniality, see Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” in Aníbal Quijano: Foundational Essays on the Coloniality of Power, ed. Walter D. Mignolo, Rita Segato, and Catherine E. Walsh (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024), 73–84.

16.

Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 62, note no. 41.

17.

Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 5–7.

18.

For overviews of some of the masculine and effeminate archetypes during this period, see Karen Harvey, “The History of Masculinity, circa 1650–1800,” Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 296–311; Declan Kavanagh, Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017), xvi–xxv; and Sally O’Driscoll, “The Molly and the Fop: Untangling Effeminacy in the Eighteenth Century,” in Developments in the Histories of Sexualities: In Search of the Normal, 1600–1800, ed. Chris Mounsey (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 145–72.

19.

See Helen Berry, “Gender, Sexuality, and the Consumption of Musical Culture in Eighteenth-Century London,” in Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England, ed. Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard, and John Walter (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2013), 65–87.

20.

See Philip Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain 1660–1800 (Harlow, UK: Longman, 2001), and Inger Sirgrun Brodey, “Masculinity, Sensibility, and the ‘Man of Feeling’: The Gendered Ethics of Goethe’s Werther,” Papers on Language and Literature 35 (1999): 115–40.

21.

Satan’s Harvest Home, or The Present State of Whorecraft, Adultery, Fornication, Procuring, Pimping, Sodomy, and the Game of Flatts (London: Dod, 1749), title page.

22.

See Linda Phyllis Austern, “‘Alluring the Auditorie to Effeminacie’: Music and the Idea of the Feminine in Early Modern England,” Music and Letters 74 (1993): 343–54.

23.

Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Romanticism and Music Culture in Britain, 1770–1840: Virtue and Virtuosity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 96–97, 101.

24.

Roger Freitas, “The Eroticism of Emasculation: Confronting the Baroque Body of the Castrato,” Journal of Musicology 20 (2003): 196–249, at 210–23.

25.

Jessica Gabriel Peritz, “The Castrato Remains—or, Galvanizing the Corpse of Musical Style,” Journal of Musicology 39 (2022): 371–403, at 380.

26.

Plain Reasons for the Growth of Sodomy in England (London: A. Dodd, 1728), 18; Satan’s Harvest Home, 56.

27.

Satan’s Harvest Home, 56, title page.

28.

Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 13.

29.

See Natalie A. Zacek, “‘Banes of Society’ and ‘Gentlemen of Strong Natural Parts’: Attacking and Defending West Indian Creole Masculinity,” in New Men: Manliness in Early America, ed. Thomas A. Foster (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 116–33.

30.

See Bauer and Mazzotti, “Introduction: Creole Subjects,” 5–6: “Human beings were now seen to be like plants, entirely dependent on their climate and soil.” Some writers went so far as to posit that over several generations in the West Indies, white Britons would gradually transform into black Africans. See Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 4.

31.

Blame was also laid on cohabitation with people of color—especially enslaved women, themselves the targets of ubiquitous sexual violence by their white enslavers. See Trevor Burnard, “‘A Compound Mongrol Mixture’: Racially Coded Humor, Satire, and the Denigration of White Creoles in the British Empire, 1784–1834,” in Seeing Satire in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Elizabeth C. Mansfield and Kelly Malone (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013), 149–65, at 157–58. On the supposed effects of the Torrid Zones on white women, see Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 225, 230–31, and Burnard, “West Indian Identity,” 80–81.

32.

Certain unflattering qualities of Cumberland’s titular West Indian may have been inspired by the late Alderman Beckford, whom the playwright had known. See Gauci, William Beckford, 204–5.

33.

Timothy Touchstone [pseud.], Tea and Sugar, or The Nabob and the Creole: A Poem, in Two Cantos (London: J. Ridgway, 1792), 11–12. See also Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 82.

34.

Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 123.

35.

Beckford to Miss [Frances] Burney (later Madame d’Arblay), Lucca, October 1, 1780, in Melville, Life and Letters, 92.

36.

Beckford to the duchesse de S. C., Venice, January 6, 1781, Bodleain MS Beckford c. 14, fol. 4v, translated (from French) in Elinor Shaffer, “William Beckford in Venice, Liminal City: The Pavilion and the Interminable Staircase,” in Venetian Views, Venetian Blinds: English Fantasies of Venice, ed. Manfred Pfister and Barbara Schaff (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 73–88, at 80.

37.

Earl of Mount-Edgcumbe (Richard Edgcumbe), Musical Reminiscences: Containing an Account of the Italian Opera in England, from 1773, 4th ed. (London: J. Andrews, 1834), 12; Charles Burney, A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 4 vols. (London, 1776–89), 4:512.

38.

After the performance of a cavatina by Piccinni, Susanna confided to her sister Frances, “He did sing it like a very Angel. To You it will give little trouble to conceive the pleasure I felt at hearing His most Sweet Voice, & that in such Sweet Music.” Journal letter entry for November 20, 1779, in Burney, Journals and Letters, 88. Frances describes the eponymous protagonist of her novel Cecilia (1782) as lending Pacchierotti’s performance “an avidity of attention almost painful from its own eagerness,” resulting in “a sensation not more new than delightful.” Frances Burney, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, 5 vols. (London, 1782), 1:109–10.

39.

Beckford to Lady Hamilton, Fonthill, October 14, 1781, in Melville, Life and Letters, 122.

40.

For a brief account of the scandal and the ensuing “culture of vigilance” around Beckford, see Max Fincher, Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age: The Penetrating Eye (Basing-stoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 30–32.

41.

Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 45; Linda Kelly, Susanna, the Captain and the Castrato: Scenes from the Burney Salon, 1779–80 (London: Starhaven, 2004), 34.

42.

Suzanne G. Cusick, “He Said, She Said? Men Hearing Women in Medicean Florence,” in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, ed. Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and Jeffrey Kallberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 53–76, at 53, 61.

43.

Cusick, “He Said, She Said?,” 53, 70.

44.

Emily Wilbourne, “The Queer History of the Castrato,” in The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, ed. Fred Everett Maus and Sheila Whiteley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 441–54, at 448.

45.

On singing and listening as physical engagement, see Nina Sun Eidsheim, Sensing Sound: Singing and Listening as Vibrational Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). For an application of this idea to the early modern context, see Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick, introduction to Acoustemologies in Contact: Sounding Subjects and Modes of Listening in Early Modernity, ed. Emily Wilbourne and Suzanne G. Cusick (Cambridge: Open Book, 2021), 1–11.

46.

Andrew Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 9, 71–82; St. Augustine, “From the Confessions,” in Source Readings in Music History, ed. W. Oliver Strunk, 5 vols. (London: Faber & Faber, 1981), 1:73–75.

47.

Dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice, 9.

48.

Wilbourne, “Queer History of the Castrato,” 448–49.

49.

Serena Guarracino, “Voices from the South: Music, Castration, and the Displacement of the Eye,” in Anglo-Southern Relations: From Deculturation to Transculturation, ed. Luigi Cazzato (Nardò: Salento Books, 2011), 40–51.

50.

Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 173.

51.

See Wheeler, Complexion of Race, 23–24.

52.

Beckford’s letters from his time on the Italian and Iberian peninsulas represent these warmer regions in overwhelmingly sensuous terms. See, for example, his descriptions of popular Brazilian modinhas in William Beckford, The Journal of William Beckford in Portugal and Spain, 1787–1788, ed. Boyd Alexander (Stroud, UK: Nonsuch, 2006), 69, 228–29.

53.

Suzanne G. Cusick, “On a Lesbian Relationship with Music: A Serious Effort Not to Think Straight,” in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, 2nd ed., ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas (New York: Routledge, 2006), 67–83, at 78–80.

54.

Beckford to Lady Hamilton, Padua, 1782, in Melville, Life and Letters, 154.

55.

Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), 25, 188–89, 217–24. On Pacchierotti’s famed sensibility, see Jessica Gabriel Peritz, The Lyric Myth of Voice: Civilizing Song in Enlightenment Italy (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022), 74–82.

56.

Elizabeth Carter to Elizabeth Montagu, Deal, December 19, 1784, in Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, to Mrs. Montagu, between the Years 1755 and 1800, ed. Montagu Pennington, 3 vols. (London: F. C. & J. Rivington, 1817), 3:233–34.

57.

Sir William was first cousin to Beckford’s mother, Maria (née Hamilton). On Lady Catherine’s skill at the keyboard, see Otto Erich Deutsch, “The First Lady Hamilton,” Notes and Queries 197 (1952): 540–43, at 541–43, and John Jenkins, Mozart and the English Connection (London: Cygnus Arts, 1998), 75. On Sir William’s own Camp exploits, see Ersy Contogouris, “Neoclassicism and Camp in Sir William Hamilton’s Naples,” in “Eighteenth-Century Camp” (special issue, Aphra Behn Online), 1–20.

58.

Beckford to Alexander Cozens, Caserta, November 30, 1780, in Melville, Life and Letters, 97.

59.

Beckford to Lady Hamilton, Venice, December 29, 1780, Bodleian MS Beckford c. 14, fol. 4r.

60.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, 30th anniversary ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 92.

61.

George E. Haggerty, “Beckford’s Pæderasty,” in Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 136–51, at 138.

62.

David M. Halperin, “How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6 (2000): 87–124.

63.

Fincher, Queering Gothic, 34.

64.

“To be camp,” writes Mark Booth, “is to present oneself as being committed to the marginal with a commitment greater than the marginal merits.” Mark Booth, “Campe-toi! On the Origins and Definitions of Camp” (1983), in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, 67–79, at 69.

65.

Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 54, note no. 2.

66.

Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 58, note no. 18. For Isherwood, the great prose stylist, deliberate “camping” was “all very well in its place, but it’s an utterly debased form.” Christopher Isherwood, “From The World in the Evening” (1954), in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, 49–52, at 51.

67.

Booth, “Campe-toi!,” 68. See also David Bergman, introduction to Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality, ed. David Bergman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 1–16, and David M. Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), 188–95.

68.

Moe Meyer, introduction to The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1–19, at 5–6. For an astute critique of Meyer’s use of “queer” and “parody,” see Fabio Cleto, “Introduction: Queering the Camp,” in Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject, 1–42, at 16–22.

69.

Cleto, “Introduction: Queering the Camp,” 26.

70.

Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 57, note no. 14; Booth, “Campe-toi!,” 71–72. See also Ula Lukszo Klein and Emily MN Kugler, eds., “Eighteenth-Century Camp” (special issue, Aphra Behn Online), and Thomas A. King, “Performing ‘Akimbo’: Queer Pride and Epistemological Prejudice,” in Politics and Poetics of Camp, 20–43.

71.

Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 56, note no. 10.

72.

Beckford to Alexander Cozens, Naples, November 16, 1780, in Melville, Life and Letters, 96.

73.

Beckford to Miss Burney, Lucca, October 1, 1780, in Melville, Life and Letters, 92–93.

74.

Judith [Jack] Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 3, 96.

75.

Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, 151. A case in point is the erasure of the taboo “gay Nazi” from twentieth-century queer narratives in light of the homosocial ethos of the Third Reich (e.g., celebrating virile masculinity while marginalizing women and effeminate men) that led to and informed discourses of queer persecution. See Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, 149–51. For an eighteenth-century example, consider the Prussian army’s culture of warme Brüder (male lovers) under the absolutist and expansionist reign of Frederick the Great (himself a practitioner of “Greek love”). See Robert Tobin, Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 26–43.

76.

Beckford to Lady Hamilton, Strasbourg, January 28, 1781, in Melville, Life and Letters, 100–101.

77.

Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (London: A. Millar, 1759).

78.

Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 124.

79.

Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 64, note no. 50. In his essay on the “cultural economy” of Camp in the late twentieth century, Andrew Ross cheekily terms this group as the “cognoscenti” of Camp. Andrew Ross, “Uses of Camp,” Yale Journal of Criticism: Interpretation in the Humanities 2 (1988): 1–24, at 10, 21.

80.

Elfenbein, Romantic Genius, 45, 49. On the relation between pointless collecting and traditional forms of sovereignty, see Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, vols. 2 and 3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 198–200.

81.

Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 56, note no. 9.

82.

Isherwood, “From The World in the Evening,” 51.

83.

Feldman, Castrato, 25.

84.

Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 59, note no. 23.

85.

Pietro Metastasio, Pel giorno natalizio di Francesco I imperatore de’ romani, in Opere di Pietro Metastasio, Biblioteca enciclopedica italiana 3 (Milan: Nicolò Bettoni, 1829), 546.

86.

Tonioli, Il tributo, 4.

87.

Tonioli, Il tributo, 4–5.

88.

On Tenducci and the vogue for sentimental Scottish ballads, see Andrew Alexander Greenwood, “Mediating Sociability: Musical Ideas of Sympathy, Sensibility, and Improvement in the Scottish Enlightenment” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2012), 136–51.

89.

Tonioli, Il tributo, 6.

90.

Tonioli, Il tributo, 6, 7.

91.

Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 12.

92.

Wilson, Island Race, 13.

93.

Tonioli, Il tributo, 8.

94.

Tonioli, Il tributo, 6–7.

95.

Colley, Britons, 5.

96.

Tonioli, Il tributo, 7.

97.

Beckford, Journal, 15.

98.

See Bonnie Gordon, “What Mr. Jefferson Didn’t Hear,” in Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, 108–32.