Book Review: The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather

I love Cather’s work, and The Song of the Lark may be the best one of her books I’ve read yet…Death Come for the Archbishop has been my favorite of her books for so long that I may not be able to supplant it, but SoL is excellent.

The story revolves around the growth of Thea Kronberg into the artist that she is. We begin with her as a child around the age of 10. Her friends are adults and misfits in the town. We don’t hear about her interactions with kids her own age nor really about her being a child at all. What we learn about Thea in the beginning of this book is that it is evident to everyone who knows her that she’s gifted, but no one can agree about what--piano, acting or singing. She knows, but she keeps her secret carefully guarded.

She begins to blossom when she is sent to Chicago to take lessons from a renowned piano instructor. It isn’t until she mentions, almost on accident, that she sings at funerals that her piano teacher discovers her true musical gift—she has a phenomenal “instrument” (as it is often referred). She then switches teachers to a voice instructor and has to play accompaniment to his other lessons in order to pay for her own lessons. She is discovered by a rich cad-about who falls in love with her and worries that she is suffering under the pressures of being an accompanist to her rigid instructor. He sends her to his ranch in Arizona where she “nests” and comes into her art and her self.

The section in Panther Canyon is so well done that I could read it again and again. I finished it feeling the anticipation of what was going to happen to Thea when I turned the next page—was she going to become the artist she was destined to become or would she fail because of some poor decision or accident or simple poverty? Would she be able to accept her gift and learn to live with it, or would she reject it because it could never meet her ideal.

The last section of the book has Thea returning to New York after spending years in Germany discovering her art. She is singing in opera after opera—a different one every night it seems. She is different characters in different voice ranges and truly shows her artistic abilities both in acting and singing. The critics and public are impressed with her, and her old friends are as well. We finally get her reunion with her early friends, and they sit back and watch as the Artist Becomes.

SoL is such a beautiful book. There were passages that I want to keep in my mind forever. Sections of such perfectly written prose evoking such perfectly poignant thoughts that it drives home the images and reality that Cather was trying to create. I wish I knew more about opera so I could understand more of the symbolism of Thea’s different characters, but even so I can “get it” that she’s done something amazing in the end.