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The Song of the Lark (1915)

by Willa Cather

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1,977528,215 (3.88)345
Willa Cather's third novel, The Song of the Lark, depicts the growth of an artist, singer Thea Kronborg. In creating Thea's character, Cather was inspired by the Swedish-born immigrant and renowned Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad, although Thea's early life also has much in common with Cather's own.Set from 1885 to 1909, the novel traces Thea's long journey from her fictional hometown of Moonstone, Colorado, to her source of inspiration in the Southwest, and to New York and the Metropolitan Opera House. As she makes her own way in the world from an unlikely background, Thea d… (more)
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Published in 1915, this is a beautifully written novel about the life of Thea Kronberg, a feisty female protagonist who overcomes the social restrictions of the time and eventually makes her mark as an opera singer. It opens in the 1890s, when Thea is eleven years old. She is one of seven children born to a Scandinavian immigrant family in the small (fictional) town of Moonstone, Colorado. She learns piano and gives lessons. She eventually moves to Chicago to pursue vocal performance education.

This book is the second in the Great Plains trilogy (along with O Pioneers! and My Antonia), Willa Cather’s narratives of strong women in the American West, but it can easily be read as a standalone. One of Cather’s strengths is the ability to vividly depict the landscapes of the places Thea visits. It is an early example of relationships in which the men in the story admire the woman for her ambition and talents and help her achieve her goals. It has aged well. I can see why it is considered a classic. ( )
1 vote Castlelass | Nov 2, 2022 |
Here's what I wrote in 2008 about this read: "Somewhat autobiographical tale of a young girl who pursue her operatic talents, taking her from Colorado, to Chicago, and the to Europe and the Met. Good read." ( )
  MGADMJK | Oct 28, 2022 |
I fell in love with The Song of the Lark the first time I read it about twenty years ago. I was in my twenties and read it for a graduate seminar. As a budding feminist, I was captivated by the depiction of a young girl who has talent and passion and who pursues her dreams into adulthood, eventually achieving great success in her field. She didn't give it all up to get married or die tragically young. I admired how Cather slowed the action down to detail the influences in Thea's younger life, her hard work, and the sacrifices that she made for her art. My favorite part of the book remains Part IV: The Ancient People. I think it's one of the most beautiful and unusual pieces in American literature and I've often re-read that section just for the pleasure of it.

With this reading I was blown away by the character of the tramp. It's not that he commits suicide by drowning himself in the well and contaminating the town water supply with typhoid that captured my imagination, but the fact that he performs as a clown. As someone who used my high school math classes back in the early 80s as time to read the latest Stephen King novel, I can't believe I didn't pick up on the utter creepiness of the tramp as clown in my earlier reading. From the first scene where Thea watches him walk into town and can smell him from the safety of her porch, it's pretty unsettling. You know he's a bad omen. But then Thea catches his smell and covers her nose with her handkerchief: "A moment later she was sorry, for she knew that he had noticed it." The tramps notices her disgust, looks away, "and shuffled a little faster" past her house. In a horror novel, Thea would have been a marked woman. A few days later Thea sees him performing in front of one of the saloons: "his bony body grotesquely attired in a clown's suit, his face shaved and painted white,--the sweat trickling through the paint and washing it away,--and his eyes wild and feverish." Part of me feels compassion for the man, but I also hear horror music screeching in the background. Cather so gracefully creates a powerful, yet subtle aura of horror with this character. It makes me wish she would have tried her hand at the ghost story.
More interested than ever to see this.

Overall, however, I admit that it was hard for me to get through The Song of the Lark this time. Part of the problem was I started reading it in ebook format and that was just not a good fit for me with this novel. Once I switched over to a hard copy the reading went a bit better, but the book still wore me out at times. I'm still pondering whether that's due to the variety of literary styles and imagery Cather used or whether it boils down to the fact that I no longer admire the myth or archetype of the Great Artist who gives up their humanity for their art.

One of the big discussions that I recall from the seminar where I first encountered Thea, was whether or not Thea is selfish, and whether we'd even ask such a question if the story were about a man. From my twenty-something perspective, I did not think Thea was selfish. I thought her drive and self-discipline was admirable. I was excited by her commitment to her passion and figured her mom understood why Thea did not come home to visit when she was on her deathbed. And it's not like she's begging Dr. Archie and Ottenburg to flutter about like they do. With this reading I saw the older Thea not so much as selfish, but as heartless and cold.

In her preface to the Autograph Edition in 1937 Cather wrote that she was portraying one type of artist, the type whose "personal life becomes paler as the imaginative life becomes richer." I was relieved to read this because it means that perhaps there are healthier and happier ways to be an artist. One doesn't have to end up a washed-up alcoholic like Wunsch, or be driven periodically insane by one's passion like Spanish Johnny, or live in emotional isolation like Thea. Or--shudder--end up completely mad like the clown. ( )
  Chris.Wolak | Oct 13, 2022 |
Nothing is far and nothing is near, if one desires. The world is little, people are little, human life is little. There is only one big thing--desire. And before it, when it is big, all is little.

Have you ever thought about true artists, like Vincent Van Gogh, who pay such a high price for their art? Men and women who have devoted half of their waking hours to the practice and perfection of their musical talents so that they can perform in an opera or become a concert pianist? Too often we think of this kind of achievement as innate talent, and of course some of it must be, but there are many talented and gifted people who never reach that level because they cannot or will not scale the wall.

In many ways, that is what this novel is about. Thea is a natural talent, and many around her recognize her abilities, but she cannot just step into the world she wants without a lot of sacrifice and loss. We trade things, always, to reach our dreams. I’m not sure Cather questions whether what Thea loses is worth the sacrifice, I think Cather thought it was, in fact, I think Cather thought of herself as being in Thea’s shoes, but I thought about whether it was worth it, and I would have said “no”.

I loved the first half of this novel, the part where Thea was a girl and trying to identify her talent and the thing that spurred her forward. I liked the quirky characters of Moonstone, the people of the country, Ray Johnson, the railroad worker who loves her from afar; Dr. Archie, who sees her as something too fine for the world she occupies; Professor Wunsch, her drunken piano teacher who discovers her talent and nurtures it; and Spanish Johnny, a Mexican musician who shares the music of the soul.

Cather is in her usual form with her writing. She can describe a scene and make you step into it.

Winter was long in coming that year. Throughout October the days were bathed in sunlight and the air was clear as crystal. The town kept its cheerful summer aspect, the desert glistened with light, the sand hills every day went through magical changes of color. The scarlet sage bloomed late in the front yards, the cottonwood leaves were bright gold long before they fell, and it was not until November that the green on the tamarisks began to cloud and fade. There was a flurry of snow about Thanksgiving, and then December came on warm and clear.

These were wonderful aspects of the book, but the second half let me down in some way that is hard to describe. I began to see Thea as rather selfish and self-centered. Although I don’t believe Cather meant her to be seen in this way, I saw her as using her friends and admirers as stepping-stones. She maintained friendships with them, and they all seemed happy to serve her as a talent fully beyond their reach, but it seemed she somehow felt entitled to anything they laid on her altar and owed them nothing in return. No doubt it was the extraordinary talent we were meant to see being worshiped, but I kept seeing Hollywood and someone who believed the talent itself made her “more” than others. I found her cold, and I wondered if she hadn’t lost that little girl somewhere along the way, even though Cather kept telling me she had not.

Finally, there is, at the heart of this book, a desire to make the reader understand and value art itself. Cather explains this to us again and again, almost too often, but I do think she nailed it here:

What was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself,--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?

For the most part, this book worked for me, but it was not quite as satisfying as [b:My Ántonia|17150|My Ántonia (Great Plains Trilogy, #3)|Willa Cather|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1389151307l/17150._SY75_.jpg|575450]. It landed at 3.5 stars, but after some deliberation, I am rounding down.
( )
  mattorsara | Aug 11, 2022 |
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, 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.

( )
  jollyavis | Dec 14, 2021 |
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"It was a wond'rous lovely storm that drove me!" - Lenau's Don Juan
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To Isabelle McClung
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Doctor Howard Archie had just come up from a game of pool with the Jewish clothier and two travelling men who happened to be staying overnight in Moonstone.
The Song of the Lark tells a tale familiar in frontier history, a tale of struggle and courage in which a determined protagonist forges a self equal to a wild and outsized land. (Introduction)
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Willa Cather's third novel, The Song of the Lark, depicts the growth of an artist, singer Thea Kronborg. In creating Thea's character, Cather was inspired by the Swedish-born immigrant and renowned Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad, although Thea's early life also has much in common with Cather's own.Set from 1885 to 1909, the novel traces Thea's long journey from her fictional hometown of Moonstone, Colorado, to her source of inspiration in the Southwest, and to New York and the Metropolitan Opera House. As she makes her own way in the world from an unlikely background, Thea d

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'Life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose..' This, the most autobiographical of Cather's novels, is the moving story of a courageous young woman determined to forge her own destiny.  Born into obscurity in a small desert town of the American West, Thea escapes her humble origins - and a doomed love affair - through the power of her extraordinary voice.  But with artistic recognition comes the realisation of the price it has for a woman: the greater her success in the musical world, the paler and more insignificant her personal life seems.
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