The Nature of the Life of the Artist in Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark

Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark (SL) chronicles the life of Thea Kronborg, from her years as a young girl growing up in the small town of Moonstone, Colorado, through her years of international acclaim as an opera singer. This novel, the most autobiographical of Cather’s works, features the dramatic landscape of the West as the catalyst of Thea’s artistic birth. Readers meet Thea as a gifted piano player unhappy with the sheltered life her parents have planned for her. With the help of Herr Wunsch, her teacher who sees her musical genius but does not completely understand it, young Thea dares to leave everyone she knows to study music in Chicago. The death of an adult admirer, Ray Kennedy, who has named her beneficiary of his life insurance, finances these studies which ultimately allow her to discover her true gift: her voice. In Chicago her next piano teacher, Andor Harsanyi, devotes much personal time to helping Thea realize this gift by challenging her to give up studying piano to study voice. However, it is not until Fred Ottenburg enables her to have a restorative summer on a ranch in the mountains of the West that she is able to discover the nature of her gift and believe in it enough to invest in study abroad, leading to her eventual success.

Though Willa Cather spent most of her adult life living in New York City, she never forgot the mountains and lush environment of her early years, the wide-open prairies of her adolescent years, and the unusual rock formations of the West, all of which she portrays in her novels. Probably most famous for this portrayal of nature is The Song of the Lark, boasting what critics commonly refer to as some of the most famous female imagery in all of literature and through which Cather shows the inspirational power of nature but goes far deeper than an artist simply responding to outdoor beauty. In this novel, Cather portrays the life of an artist as one who not only embodies the joy and power of art but also the pain and isolation of the one set apart by this gift.

Cather’s The Song of the Lark depicts the development of the artist in the growth of Thea from a young girl who loves music to a mature artist who embodies art through opera singing, much like Cather’s own growth from a young girl who enjoyed literature to a mature author for whom creating literature was central. Most scholars discuss The Song of the Lark as “by far her most personal and revealing novel” because of its theme and the extensive use of details from her early life (Lee 120). As is true of Thea, some of Cather’s earliest and most persistent memories were of knowing herself to be different from other people and of striving to prove herself to the world. This spirit of pride in being specially gifted inhabits The Song of the Lark, her story of an artist’s awakening. This novel Cather once referred to in a letter as her fairy tale, perhaps because of its Cinderella type of story line. Here we see Cather’s powerful, lifelong romanticism explode in the strong physicality and personality of Thea Kronborg. Thea embodies everything Cather hoped for from art for herself and everything she saw in the great artists of her day, mirroring her own coming-alive experience as an artist and that of her friend, opera singer Olive Fremstad. In Thea, Cather creates an artist whose identity and fulfillment come solely through her art. Thea is not solely a portrait of Fremstad, as she has much of young Cather and others in her as well. Nevertheless, Thea’s experiences as a singer are informed by Cather’s knowledge of Fremstad’s experiences. As Edith Lewis writes, “[Fremstad] herself recognized herself in Thea when she read the story, and at their next meeting flung her arms about Willa Cather, exclaiming that she could not tell where Thea...