A Wicked Voice by Vernon Lee is a short story about a 19th-century Scandinavian composer named Magnus who, haunted by the ghost of an 18th-century Italian singer named Zaffirino, loses his passion for decadent music and instead comes to realize his true love of classical music.

"A Wicked Voice" is fueled by Lee's love for classical music (18th century Italian opera specifically), her disdain for decadent music (Wagner especially), and her troubled yet obsessive relationship with the past (which assumes the character of a ghost in Zaffirino).

The short story explores themes such as sexuality and eroticism, ghosts of the past, aestheticism, and "art for sanity's sake."

In "A Wicked Voice" Lee critiques decadent music by showing classical music to be superior. Her critiques of decadent music especially concern Wagner, as they do elsewhere in her other works such as "Beauty and Sanity" and “The Religious and Moral Status of Wagner”. Her musical stance is well-voiced in “Beauty and Sanity” where she wrote, "Wagner's work conveniently serves to exemplify everything dangerous and morbid in modern art, an art that tends to derange the listener's soul. The works of Handel, Gluck, Mozart, or Palestrina, by contrast, exemplify the sanity of an invigorating classicism."

Lee's inspiration for the story began in 1872 when, while at the old Accademia Filarmonica, she became obsessed with a painting of Italian Singer Carlo Broschi, otherwise known as Farinelli (1705–82). Her longing to hear Farinelli's voice inspired her to write a story about him and his singing, which she did two years after her initial encounter with the portrait of him. This story, published later in 1881, was titled “A Culture Ghost: Or, Winthrop's Adventure.” Six years later, the story developed into something new altogether and was published in Les Lettres Et Les Arts under the title of “Voix Maudite.” However, Lee continued to develop Farinelli's story further until, in 1889 the final version of “A Wicked Voice” appeared in her four story collection titled Hauntings.

"A Wicked Voice" by Vernon Lee recounts the tale of a 19th-century composer named Magnus. He is in Venice to compose music for his opera, Ogier the Dane. In Venice, however, his inspiration weakens "in the stagnant lagoon of the past", as the culture and history of Venice confuse his musical ideals: "It was as if there arose out of its shallow waters a miasma of long-dead melodies, which sickened but intoxicated my soul" (208).

He comes across an American etcher, who gifts Magnus an engraving of a famous eighteenth-century singer, Balthasar Cesari, otherwise known as Zaffirino due to "a sapphire engraved with cabalistic signs presented to him one evening by a masked stranger. . . that great cultivator of the human voice, the devil" (199). Magnus becomes obsessed with Zaffirno's painting and finds himself cursed by the singer's voice, which embodies everything he disdains in music.

Magnus describes Zaffirino as attractive and very skilled at singing. His singing attracts the narrator to the point where he finds himself trying to mimic Zaffirino's voice in his own works. This proves detrimental to his career as his own inspirations succumb to Zaffirino's influence. Torn between his own inspirations and those from Zaffirino, Magnus exclaims: “Singer, thing of evil, stupid and wicked slave of the voice... instrument which was not invented by the human intellect." The composer describes Zaffirino's singing as an evil “Beast,” which establishes the composer's notion that the singer's voice is a wicked instrument.