(Ron Scheer from the 2014 archives)
Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915)
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| Willa Cather, c1912 |
Willa Cather was a fine writer, with a special take on what it was like
to grow up in a small town on the plains among descendants of immigrant
homesteaders. The Song of the Lark tells
of a young woman, Thea Kronborg, with a talent for music, who as the daughter
of a minister finds friendship and approval not among her peers but among older
men: a railway brakeman, the town doctor, and a piano teacher. They coach her
through childhood and into adulthood, encouraging her to develop her musical
abilities.
Plot. Cather
follows her heroine to Chicago to study with a pianist, who discovers that she
has an even greater talent for singing. Eventually, she goes to Germany to
train as an operatic singer, and by novel’s end, she has been cast in roles
that have her drawing enthusiastic audiences at the Met in New York.
Along the
way, she is befriended by the son of a millionaire brewer, who would marry her
if he did not already have a wife—estranged but not willing to divorce him. He
welcomes Thea to a ranch in Arizona, where she is inspired by abandoned cliff
dwellings built into the walls of a nearby canyon.
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| Cather's childhood home, Red Cloud, Nebraska |
Themes. Cather, who grew
up in Nebraska, left her home state after a university education. Settling
first in Pittsburgh and then in New York, she developed as an editor and
writer. One suspects that she draws on her experience as a social outlier from
a provincial backwater to inform the transformation her central character undergoes
as she adapts to urban life and finds a place among artists as gifted as herself.
Cather describes in precise detail the family life into which Thea
Kronborg is born. There is the upper room she retreats to in a house she shares
with six siblings, as well as the larger social milieu that attempts, though
seldom successfully, to contain and restrain her. Of an independent mind, she
easily befriends and values those of different social status, including the
community of Mexicans who live on the outskirts of her little Colorado town.
As a teenager she must deal with the small mindedness and petty
rivalries of the locals. Even her sister is critical of her for the way her
freethinking behavior generates gossip. Determined to be self reliant as an
adult, Thea takes on piano students and expects with more training to support
herself as a piano teacher. It takes encouragement from the men in her life to
set higher goals that will eventually find her on the world’s stage, far from
the provincial confinement that in time would choke within her the artistic
gifts she has been granted.
.jpg) |
| Jules Breton, The Song of the Lark |
A shock comes midway in the novel as one of her truest and most trusted
friends is killed in a train crash. The life insurance he has left her makes
possible a winter of professional music training in Chicago. Living there in
near poverty, she is coaxed to open herself to the arts, and a painting she
discovers in the Art Institute inspires her to a higher calling. The painting
by Jules Breton, The Song of the Lark (1884) provides
the novel with its title.
Romance. Compared to
other novels of the day, The Song of the Lark puts little stock in the
character enhancing benefits bestowed by romance. The men in Thea’s life are
older than she by many years, or they are already married. What binds her to
them are not romantic feelings but the warmth of friendship and shared
experiences, often appreciation of the beauties of nature, such as the nearby
sand hills or the dramatic, colorful canyons of Arizona.
Friendship entails the sharing of ideas, a degree of intellectual intimacy
that values a search for truth and authenticity. Thea also understands that
surrendering to romance compromises her dreams of fully developing her talent
and becoming an operatic singer of repute.
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| The Art Institute, Chicago, 1900 |
Storytelling
style. At 489 pages, The Song of the
Lark was a big, fat novel when it was published, and remains so. A
modern-day reader will find a pattern of plot development similar in structure
to biography, as we learn of the early years of someone who has become well
known in the world for their accomplishments. Family, social environment,
geography are all factors in the drawing of that portrait. And Cather is particularly good at rendering these in her precise prose
style.
At one point, early in the novel, she remarks that a good storyteller
should be observant, truthful, and kindly, and she is all of these. Here she
describes a minister of small ambitions who auditions Thea for his church
choir:
The Reverend Larsen
was not an insincere man. He merely spent his life resting and playing, to make
up for the time his forebears had wasted grubbing the earth. He was simple-hearted
and kind; he enjoyed his candy and his children and his sacred cantatas. He
could work energetically at almost any form of play.
In the novel’s later chapters, Cather shows an uncommon interest in
describing and defining the personality traits that go into the makeup of a
fine artiste. We find characters in
long dialogues devoted to the subject.
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| Metropolitan Opera, c1900 |
Opinions expressed often come across as subjectively impressionistic, illuminating
perhaps only if the reader is an opera lover and likely to have puzzled over
the same questions of greatness among performers who have risen to fame in this
rarefied art form. It is believed, it should be noted, that Thea Kronberg was
modeled on the character and life story of Wagnerian soprano, Olive Fremstad (1871–1951),
who was at the height of her career in the 1910s.
Willa Cather (1873–1947) was a
Virginian by birth and lived from the age of nine in little Red Cloud,
Nebraska. Her life on the Great Plains became the source of some of her best
fiction, including O Pioneers! (1913)
and My Ántonia (1918). The Troll Garden (1905) was a collection
of stories written during her years living and working in Pittsburgh.
Cather joined the editorial staff of McClure’s in 1906, which published many
of her poems and stories in the following years. Of her several novels, A Lost Lady (1923) reached the screen
twice, as a silent film in 1924 and again as a sound film in 1934, with Barbara
Stanwyck. After Cather’s death, several titles were adapted for TV, including O Pioneers! (1992) starring Jessica
Lange, My Antonia (1995), and The Song of the Lark (2001).
