Lyra's own article already gives Vega its due as a former and future pole star and the anchor of the Summer Triangle. Its more quietly important role came a full century before any of that language of precession was common knowledge to the public: Vega was the first star other than the Sun ever captured on camera.
In 1850, the American astronomer John Adams Whipple photographed Vega through the telescope at the Harvard College Observatory, producing what is generally credited as the first successful photograph of a star, at a time when photographic technology was barely a decade old and stellar photography was considered close to impossible given how faint even a bright star's light is compared to a daylight scene. Vega's brightness made it a natural first target, and the success helped establish photography as a serious tool for astronomy rather than only for portraits and landscapes.
Vega went on to serve a second, related role: for much of the twentieth century its brightness was used informally as something close to a zero point for the star magnitude scale, a reference other stars were measured against, a purely technical distinction with nothing to do with Orpheus's lyre or the myth that gives the constellation its shape.
A star already carrying the mythic weight of a musician's instrument became, quite separately, one of the first fixed points the young science of astrophotography learned to trust.