The Song of the Lark

A complex character study of the glorified American Dream being achieved by an ambitious woman through luck, perseverance, pragmatism, and talent, with the biggest drawcard the beautiful lush descriptions of the land and the scenery.

There's a lack of the usual over-fictionalised transcendental and obsessive euphoria that is usually associated when writing about (musical) talents. Instead, there's deliberate diversions of reality: of poverty, of the very real chance of failure, of the petty jealousies and anger at the simple populace for popularising what would appear to the uber-professionals as mediocrity - even if the novel insists that the reason Thea is mad about the less-talented popular acts is due to her lofty standards about show more artistry. Music here really just serves as the superficial catalyst for Thea's upward trajectory, but with no real feeling.

In fact, the story is less about musical talent and ability than the vitality of life in a strong-minded independent young woman yearning for a life bigger than what her picturesque yet suffocatingly small-living town can give. Yet, in what is perhaps at telling indication of the times, her determined drive to success was really only fueled and aided by the men who believed - or needed to believe that their own life's purpose is to help Thea succeed in order to placate their own average adequacies -, and (sometimes inappropriately, I mean, has it really always been acceptable for 30something-year-olds to plan their future marriage to a current 12-year-old?) loved her. By contrast, the women who believed in her could not materially help her and as such is mostly cut off from her journeys.

Beyond her dour persistence and brief moments of happiness in nature and physical exertions, I feel like Thea's real personality remain hidden from the reader even as she achieves success - that her sentimentality for the land of her childhood, doesn't extend to sentimentality for people nor really for the music that she so holds upon a pedestal. But I also feel that that is the theme across Cather's prairie trilogy, less individual-focused and more a celebration of the archetypal personalities born of the Scandinavian immigrants on the Great Plains. show less

27. [4194892::The Song of the Lark] by [[Willa Cather]]
published: 1915
format: 334 pages within the ebook [The Prairie Trilogy: O Pioneers!; The Song of the Lark; My Antoniá]
acquired: May
read: May 12 – June 8
time reading: 16 hr 28 min, 3.0 min/page
rating: 4

Cather wasn’t supposed to be my theme this year, but here I am finishing a third book and committed to reading more. I always imagined her as a prairie writer, but each book has covered a different kind of atmosphere. Here we begin on the plains, in the sand hills of Eastern Colorado, in a small railroad town where we follow one of the daughters of a local minister. But then we make our way to 1890’s Chicago, the Arizona desert and the opera world of New York City. A young Thea show more Kronberg stands out in Moonstone, Colorado, drawing interest from a series of admirers. She doesn’t get along so well with those of her own age or of the small-town mentality. She seems to have the mindset and determination that can lead something important in her life and seems to draw those who want to help her.

Thea’s life is roughly based on the life of a Swedish-born American Opera singer Olive Fremsted, a quirky genius who grew up Minnesota and trained in Germany. In interviews, Cather was struck by her simplicity and deep focus on her work and saw parallels with the plains character she wanted to capture. So, Cather created her own variety of master opera singer, an artist of shear will and determination and focus, grounded in the plains, led by a variety of well-meaning men who all watch her move on. Not lovers, all of them, but admirers of the arts and of Thea. And then Cather throws in a detour to the Canyons of Arizona and the Anasazi cliff-dwellings. Arizona canyons…sun, sky, desert, mystery, isolation – this personal spiritual detour is the best part of this book and of anything I’ve read by Cather so far.

Cather is a writer of her time in terms of her ideas of art and culture, but she is a timeless prose artist and master at capturing the nature and experience of the landscape, the light and space and the mixture of permanence and change. She is also an especially good character builder and seems to make it her mission to create untraditional strong women characters. In the later, Thea is a classic example. This book is far more sophisticated than O Pioneers or Death Comes for the Archbishop (which are what I’ve read). Here she is trying to capture a stubborn powerful mind becoming an artist, almost always through the eyes of the beholders, her many mentors. She is there to be watched and experienced, and Cather uses a number of tricks to allow the reader to do just this. The result isn’t exactly a happy success story. There is a cost to all this. Her success depends on capricious iffy public taste. And one can feel Thea’s isolation, physical exhaustion, and her inability to bond with anyone who isn’t an admirer, her unwillingness to look around and take in the world. She is focused.

I’ve developed into a big fan of Cather. I love her prose, her characters and the landscape through her eyes. Looking forward to My Antiona. Recommended to anyone interested.

2019
https://www.librarything.com/topic/306026#6840669 show less

I’m going to go out on a limb and say this was the best novel of 1915. When I told my brother I was reading The Song of The Lark, he said he had read it too, after he had read a mention of it in an article by Arlene Croce saying that it was one of the only novels about the development of a young girl into an artist. I was curious exactly what kind of zingy one-liner had entranced my brother into reading this book, so I looked up what Croce said specifically, and it was in a review of the dancer Suzanne Farrell’s autobiography. “Holding On to the Air isn’t really the inside story of Suzanne Farrell and George Balanchine. The real inside story would take a writer of Willa Cather’s stature to deal with. In The Song of the Lark, show more Cather’s novel about a girl from a prairie town who becomes a great Wagnerian soprano, we discover the true dimensions of a life lived for art.” I do wish that I got to read more often about a girl developing into a great artist. In addition, the main character was a florid example of Enneagram Type Four, my favorite type, which I just loved.

The protagonist, Thea, is a Scandinavian-American girl living in a no-account town in Colorado. She has always felt that she is different from everyone else, and is fiercely sensitive and beset by envy. She is taking piano lessons from a decrepit alcoholic who was once a brilliant pianist, and it is understood that when she is grown she can make her living as a piano teacher herself. The town doctor is her closest friend and confidant. There’s a freight train conductor, Ray, who is in love with her even though she’s only eleven. Cather manages to convey this as sort of sweet but I still couldn’t help reading it as creepy. However, Ray dies before he can get his hands on Thea, and he leaves her some money which allows her to go to Chicago at the age of seventeen to study piano.

Always in her heart she’s thought of herself as a singer, but she’s too independent-minded and it’s too precious for her to discuss it. However, when her piano instructor finally hears her sing, he sets her on another path.

Although Thea is very single-minded about her art, she does fall in love at one point with a rich young man. Unfortunately, he’s a louse who doesn’t tell her until after he’s proposed and they’ve gone away together that he’s already married and can’t get a divorce. (His wife “goes mad” and is put in the asylum. Did she have syphilis or was that in another book of 1915?) Willa Cather writes about this guy like she likes him, but I don’t. Anyway, the rich beau does remain very loyal to Thea, and so does her doctor friend. I do get the impression that Cather finds it hard to take romantic love between a woman and a man very seriously.

One thing that’s really notable about this book is how not-racist it is, compared to most of the books of 1915. As a girl, Thea likes to hang out with the Mexicans who live in her town, especially Spanish Johnny and the other musicians. These characters and their music are described with seriousness, individuality, and respect. (I don’t think she achieved this high standard in all her books, though. I’m not looking forward to Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Cather’s last novel, but maybe by 2040 I’ll be too old and decrepit to review books.) Anyway, Cather’s descriptions overall are marvelous. They have a poignant quality, making me feel as if she’s depicting my own self, when nothing could be farther from the truth.

What I remember best about this book:

“But you see, when I set out from Moonstone [her hometown] with you, I had a rich, romantic past. I had lived a long, eventful life, and an artist’s life, every hour of it. Wagner says, in his most beautiful opera, that art is only a way of remembering youth. And the older we grow the more precious it seems to us, and the more richly we can present that memory. When we’ve got it all out,—the last, the finest thrill of it, the brightest hope of it,” she lifted her hand above her head and dropped it,—“then we stop. We do nothing but repeat after that. The stream has reached the level of the source. That’s our measure.”

When I was looking for the Arlene Croce quotation online, I found a lot of other strange quotations about Willa Cather. People have many weird things to say about her. For example, in an extremely transphobic and unreadable 1997 New Yorker article, the author speculates that Willa Cather would have been “impatient” with Brandon Teena and considered his “gender confusion” as “self-indulgent.” I think of all the authors of this time period, Willa Cather would be the least likely to be a hater, but obviously no one including me has any idea what she thought (or would have thought) about something that didn’t have a name in her time period. Gore Vidal in 1992: “(Willa Cather) liked men to be men, and women to be men, too. She seemed unaware of the paradox.” Huh? It seems that Willa Cather conjures up some very strong ideas in people’s minds and she is still kind of a lightning rod when it comes to gender. show less

Only through a novel can a long-dead writer convey to a Texas farm boy what it is like to be a great opera singer. As much as I celebrate popular fiction, on rare occasions beautifully constructed prose pulls me to an author like Willa Cather. Like many of her fans, My Ántonia won me over. Song of the Lark paints a portrait of the artist, and it is not always beautiful. Talent drives an artist to perfection. They derive no satisfaction from the merely good. They can be insensitive, exacting and rude because the artist suffers pain from witnessing anything less than greatness. For example, she can not compliment those whose talent does not match her own because their failure is repugnant. The artist suffers the wrong notes as much as show more she appreciates the right notes. This quality makes the artist unique. Only during the brief window when she achieves the pinnacle of her prowess as an artist is highest is she content. Exceptional talent leads to a selfish life and in many ways is a curse. I am hesitant to recommend it because it is a slow read, yet if you want a break from the top ten on BookTok, then it's worth it. show less

[The Song of the Lark] is [Willa Cather]'s third novel, apparently written between [O Pioneers!] and [My Antonia]. It demonstrates the surprising range of her writing beyond the prairies of Nebraska. This one is about a small town Colorado girl, Thea Kronborg, possessed of a compelling musical gift, and her determination to experience it fully.

Thea grows up in a large household in Moonstone, Colorado, headed by her highly organized and insightful mother. "Mrs. Kronborg's children were all trained to dress themselves at the earliest possible age, to make their own beds - the boys as well as the girls - to take care of their clothes, to eat what was given them, and to keep out of the way. Mrs. Kronborg would have been a good chess-player; show more she had a head for moves and positions."

But Thea can feel herself being called away from the predictable life waiting for her. "Thea got her music book and stole quietly out of the garden. She did not go home, but wandered off into the sand dunes, where the prickly pear was in blossom and the green lizards were racing each other in the glittering light. She was awakened by a passionate excitement. She did not altogether understand what {music teacher} Wunsch was talking about; and yet, in a way, she knew. She knew, of course, that there was something about her that was different. But it was more like a friendly spirit than like anything that was part of herself. She brought everything to it, and it answered her; happiness consisted of that backward and forward movement of herself."

She can only learn so much in Moonstone, and eventually is sent to study with a music teacher in Chicago. He turns out to be just what this talented, but naive and largely untrained, girl needs. "It was like a wild bird that had flown into his studio on Middleton Street from goodness knew how far! No one knew that it had come, or even that it existed; least of all the strange, crude girl in whose throat beat its passionate wings." How far can she travel on those passionate wings?

The book is divided into three parts. The first, set in Moonstone, will feel familiar to those who have read the more famous Nebraska novels. But Thea is a fish out of water in many ways, strikingly illustrated by an evening she spends in the Mexican part of town, enchanted with music, as she sings with Spanish Johnny and others. Her family, except for her mother, finds it scandalous. Her mother understands her, and essentially asks the others what their problem is.

The last two parts of the book chronicle Thea's learning about her craft and living in the city, as well as her breakthroughs, as she rises in the world of music. She is spiky and not always likeable, but there is no deviation from her integrity, charisma or passion. In another lovely section of the book, a paramour invites her to spend her summer at his ranch in northern Arizona, where she spends nearly all her time exploring Panther Canyon and the ruins of the cave houses and "rock-rooms" of the long gone ancient Cliffdwellers. There her mind empties and the way forward becomes clear.

The book is filled with vibrant, real characters, many of whom try to help her on her way. That she will continue to fight to realize her gift, and the rewards of performance, is never in doubt. "As long as she lived that ecstasy was going to be hers. She would live for it, work for it, die for it; but she was going to have it, time after time, height after height." I'd love to know more about where in Cather's experience this all comes from,; it's a fascinating and rewarding read. We accompany Thea as she struggles to make herself a successful artist and person, to surmount her small town ignorance and limitations, and to attempt to become a big city and international presence. Yet that small town upbringing remains ever in her thoughts, and a guide for her actions. The book title comes from a painting of a girl working in a field that she sees in the Art Institute of Chicago. When she sees it, it simply strikes her as"right". "The flat country, the early morning light, the wet fields, the look in the girl's heavy face - well, they were all hers, anyhow, whatever was there." It's the transformation of that girl, along with what will never be transformed, that makes for such an captivating reading experience. show less

The Song of the Lark - Cather
Audio Performance by Barbara Caruso - (3 stars)
4 stars

This book is part of Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy. It begins with Thea Kronberg’s childhood in a small Colorado town and follows her life as she leaves her small town roots behind her to pursue a successful singing career. The book has Cather’s wonderful descriptions of the landscape and the community, but mostly it is an intense character study.

“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”

I think that quote may be at the root of my mixed feelings about this book. Most of the time I show more liked Thea. I admired her dedication and her persistence as she continued to grow as an artist. She works hard and sacrifices her own happiness to achieve a level of perfection with no guarantee that she will ever succeed. Her own high standards of perfection leave her frustrated and dissatisfied much of the time.

At other times I disliked her inherent narcissism. This book is said to be Cather’s most autobiographical, so it may be the author’s narcissism that makes me uncomfortable. She seems to say, in more ways than one throughout the story, that anyone who isn’t a great artist cannot possibly understand. Human population is divided between the great artists and ‘the stupid’.

My sympathy lies with the characters who loved and cared for Thea Kronberg; her mother, Dr. Archie, and her lover, Fred Ottenburg. Thea isn’t without feeling for the people who care for her, but she will always put her artistic needs before anything or anyone else. show less

Our title “lark” is Thea Kronborg, a young girl growing up in Colorado in the late 19th century. Even at a young age her musical talent is obvious. She learns how to play the piano and her ability soon out shines the resources available in her tiny hometown. Thea’s story is told in six sections which chronicle her struggle to become an artist.

We watch as she befriends the community doctor, teaches piano lessons, loses a good friend in an accident, discovers the Mexican community in her town, and more. As she grows up she begins the lifelong battle to find a balance between ambition and family, a desire to succeed and her personal relationships. Her journey is a long one, taking her at times away from her goal or into lonely show more places to improve her talent.

The message that seems to echo throughout time is that you can have success and glory or you can have a life filled with family and friends. So often the two seem mutually exclusive. The closer Thea got to her dream, the farther she was from the people who loved her most.

When Thea heads to Denver to study music it's a lot like a freshman leaving for college for the first time. They ache for the life they are leaving, but when they return home everything feels different. But in reality she’s the one who has changed, and her experiences are making her see her family in a whole new light. They have completely different in goals and values and she has a hard time reconciling her feelings with this new discovery.

As her priorities shift, she can’t relate to her family in the same way she used to. They have so little in common and a shared childhood can only get you so far. Their intolerance of the Mexican people makes no sense to her and only drives them further apart. I think many people have the same realization when they leave home in those formative years. As you discover more about the world around you and the views of other people, you begin to question the things you took for granted as fact in your youth.

Thea’s talent is both a gift and a curse. Life is almost simpler for those who aren’t endowed with natural abilities that shine so brightly. Less is expected from them and they are able to choose their path with lower expectations.

* This is technically the second novel in the author’s Prairie Trilogy, but each novel works as a standalone.

BOTTOM LINE: Cather’s writing is beautiful and I can’t wait to read more of her work. I didn’t love it quite as much as “O Pioneers!” but Thea’s struggle resonated with me. She learned so much over the years. She had to make difficult decisions about her future. As we grow up we are shaped by our experience and the paths we choose. That still remains true a century after the book was first published.

“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”

“People live through such pain only once. Pain comes again—but it finds a tougher surface.”

“Art is only a way of remembering youth. And the older we grow the more precious it seems to us." show less