I've meant to read Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark for a number of years. For one thing, I'm a fan of the genre: novels about divas, whether real or fictional. In the former category, you'll find Marcia Davenport's Of Lena Geyer, which seems to be built around the lives of the author's mother, soprano Alma Gluck, Olive Fremstad, and Geraldine Farrar. (If you don't believe me about the latter, I believe that Geyer has...a relationship....with a famous conductor. Okay, that could be any number of singers, but Farrar's affair with Arturo Toscanini is notorious.) In the latter category, we have Robertson Davies's wonderful A Mixture of Frailties and James McCourt's magnificent Mawrdew Czgowchwz, which is about fandom as well as about the singer in question. Yes, I do have to look up the spelling every time I write about it, and yes, actually, she's fictional, but also loosely based on a singer whose initials she shared, and some of the characters are real divas in disguise.
I did finally read The Song of the Lark a couple of months ago, as an accompaniment to Wagnerism, and, well, there were a few surprises.
The novel is centered around Thea Kronborg, a child of Swedish immigrants, who grows up in Colorado about an hour from Denver. She is musically talented and her parents make sure she has piano lessons, from a faded German musician who has drinking and other problems. She doesn't have much in the way of friends among her peers, though there are rivalries; she does have a large family and a loving, perceptive mother. (Her mother was one of my favorite characters in the book.) Her closest friends are adults, including Ray Kennedy, an older railway man who adores her, and Dr. Howard Archie, unhappily married and 20 years or more her senior. Eventually, she moves to Chicago to study with a far better piano teacher, who discovers that she has a voice. Singing lessons, and eventually a career, ensue.
This is a famous book by a well-known author, and it's partially based on the life of Olive Fremstad, a famed soprano active at the Met from 1903 to 1914. Cather was a music critic at one time in her life, sharp and perceptive in her observations, and gets all of the musical and operatic details right. (This is rarer than you might think.) However, as a novel, it's very much a mixed bag. Thea's relationships with others and herself are done well and there are lovely observations about life in the high desert.
But the book is also deeply flawed. Cather builds her plot to a particular possibility, concealing certain facts from Thea but not you, then yanks the rug out from under you and jumps 10 years into the future, leaving all details about what happened with the possibility unexplored and unexplained. I would definitely have liked to read about the discussion that took place between two of the characters. I don't know why Cather makes this huge jump in time; did she feel unable to adequately present what happened?
We see Thea and two important male characters in NYC in that ten-years-later period, briefly. Then there's an epilogue, and some things have happened, but they are also unexplained, although certain events are implied. This wasn't Cather's first novel, and this must have been deliberate, but oh boy, I am so curious about why she made some of these choices. They leave the book with enormous plot holes and rob the it of some character development. I was left scratching my head.
In addition, none of the discussions of the book that I've seen mention the casual racism, toward Black people, Native Americans, Mexicans, and Jewish people, as far as I can tell even in Alex Ross's Wagnerism. There is some stereotyping of Swedish and German people as well. I was shocked when I read the racist passages and I'm shocked that nobody mentions this.
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