A Wagner Matinée
Willa Cather
We sat at the extreme left of the first balcony, facing the arc of our own and
the balcony above us, veritable hanging gardens, brilliant as tulip beds. The
matinée audience was made up chiefly of women. One lost the contour of faces and
figures, indeed any effect of line whatever, and there was only the color of
bodices past counting, the shimmer of fabrics soft and firm, silky and sheer;
red, mauve, pink, blue, lilac, purple, ecru, rose, yellow, cream, and white, all
the colors that an impressionist finds in a sunlit landscape, with here and
there the dead shadow of a frock coat. My Aunt Georgiana regarded them as though
they had been so many daubs of tube paint on a palette.
When the musicians came out and took their places, she gave a little stir of
anticipation and looked with quickening interest down over the rail at that
invariable grouping, perhaps the first wholly familiar thing that had greeted
her eye since she had left old Maggie and her weakling calf. I could feel how
all those details sank into her soul, for I had not forgotten how they had sunk
into mine when I came fresh from plowing forever and forever between green
aisles of corn, where, as in a treadmill, one might walk from daybreak to dusk
without perceiving a shadow of change. The clean profiles of the musicians, the
gloss of their linen, the dull black of their coats, the beloved shapes of the
instruments, the patches of yellow light thrown by the green shaded lamps on the
smooth, varnished bellies of the cellos and the bass viols in the rear, the
restless, wind-tossed forest of fiddle necks and bows—I recalled how, in the
first orchestra I had ever heard, those long bow strokes seemed to draw the
heart out of me, as a conjurer’s stick reels out yards of paper ribbon from a
hat.
The first number was the Tannhäuser overture. When the horns drew out the first
strain of the Pilgrim’s chorus, my Aunt Georgiana clutched my coat sleeve. Then
it was I first realized that for her this broke a silence of thirty years; the
inconceivable silence of the plains. With the battle between the two motives,
with the frenzy of the Venusberg theme and its ripping of strings, there came to
me an overwhelming sense of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat;
and I saw again the tall, naked house on the prairie, black and grim as a wooden
fortress; the black pond where I had learned to swim, its margin pitted with
sun-dried cattle tracks; the rain-gullied clay banks about the naked house, the
four dwarf ash seedlings where the dishcloths were always hung to dry before the
kitchen door. The world there was the flat world of the ancients; to the east, a
cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to
sunset; between, the conquests of peace, dearer bought than those of war.
The overture closed, my aunt released my coat sleeve, but she said nothing. She
sat staring at the orchestra through a dullness of thirty years, through the
films made little by little by each of the three hundred and sixty-five days in
every one of them. What, I wondered, did she get from it? She had been a good
pianist in her day I knew, and her musical education had been broader than that
of most music teachers of a quarter of a century ago. She had often told me of
Mozart’s operas and Meyerbeer’s, and I could remember hearing her sing, years
ago, certain melodies of Verdi’s. When I had fallen ill with a fever in her
house she used to sit by my cot in the evening—when the cool, night wind blew in
through the faded mosquito netting tacked over the window and I lay watching a
certain bright star that burned red above the cornfield—and sing “Home to our
mountains, O, let us return!” in a way fit to break the heart of a Vermont boy
near dead of homesickness already.
I watched her closely through the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, trying vainly
to conjecture what that seething turmoil of strings and winds might mean to her,
but she sat mutely staring at the violin bows that drove obliquely downward,
like the pelting streaks of rain in a summer shower. Had this music any message
for her? Had she enough left to at all comprehend this power which had kindled
the world since she had left it? I was in a fever of curiosity, but Aunt
Georgiana sat silent upon her peak in Darien. She preserved this utter
immobility throughout the number from The Flying Dutchman, though her fingers
worked mechanically upon her black dress, as though, of themselves, they were
recalling the piano score they had once played. Poor old hands! They had been
stretched and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and lift and knead with; the
palms unduly swollen, the fingers bent and knotted—on one of them a thin, worn
band that had once been a wedding ring. As I pressed and gently quieted one of
those groping hands, I remembered with quivering eyelids their services for me
in other days.
Soon after the tenor began the “Prize Song,” I heard a quick drawn breath and
turned to my aunt. Her eyes were closed, but the tears were glistening on her
cheeks, and I think, in a moment more, they were in my eyes as well. It never
really died, then—the soul that can suffer so excruciatingly and so
interminably; it withers to the outward eye only; like that strange moss which
can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and yet, if placed in water, grows green
again. She wept so throughout the development and elaboration of the melody.
During the intermission before the second half of the concert, I questioned my
aunt and found that the “Prize Song” was not new to her. Some years before there
had drifted to the farm in Red Willow County a young German, a tramp
cow-puncher, who had sung the chorus at Bayreuth, when he was a boy, along with
the other peasant boys and girls. Of a Sunday morning he used to sit on his
gingham-sheeted bed in the hands’ bedroom which opened off the kitchen, cleaning
the leather of his boots and saddle, singing the “Prize Song,” while my aunt
went about her work in the kitchen. She had hovered about him until she had
prevailed upon him to join the country church, though his sole fitness for this
step, in so far as I could gather, lay in his boyish face and his possession of
this divine melody. Shortly afterward he had gone to town on the Fourth of July,
been drunk for several days, lost his money at a faro table, ridden a saddled
Texan steer on a bet, and disappeared with a fractured collarbone. All this my
aunt told me huskily, wanderingly, as though she were talking in the weak lapses
of illness.
“Well, we have come to better things than the old Trovatore at any rate, Aunt
Georgie?” I queried, with a well-meant effort at jocularity.
Her lip quivered and she hastily put her handkerchief up to her mouth. From
behind it she murmured, “And you have been hearing this ever since you left me,
Clark?” Her question was the gentlest and saddest of reproaches.
The second half of the program consisted of four numbers from the Ring, and
closed with Siegfried’s funeral march. My aunt wept quietly, but almost
continuously, as a shallow vessel overflows in a rainstorm. From time to time
her dim eyes looked up at the lights which studded the ceiling, burning softly
under their dull glass globes; doubtless they were stars in truth to her. I was
still perplexed as to what measure of musical comprehension was left to her, she
who had heard nothing but the singing of gospel hymns at Methodist services in
the square frame schoolhouse on Section Thirteen for so many years. I was wholly
unable to gauge how much of it had been dissolved in soapsuds, or worked into
bread, or milked into the bottom of a pail.
The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in the shining
current of it; I never knew how far it bore her, or past what happy islands.
From the trembling of her face I could well believe that before the last numbers
she had been carried out where the myriad graves are, into the gray, nameless
burying grounds of the sea; or into some world of death vaster yet, where, from
the beginning of the world, hope has lain down with hope and dream with dream
and, renouncing, slept.
The concert was over; the people filed out of the hall chattering and laughing,
glad to relax and find the living level again, but my kinswoman made no effort
to rise. The harpist slipped its green felt cover over his instrument; the flute
players shook the water from their mouthpieces; the men of the orchestra went
out one by one, leaving the stage to the chairs and music stands, empty as a
winter cornfield.
I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. “I don’t want to
go, Clark, I don’t want to go!”
I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert hall, lay the black
pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with
weather-curled boards; naked as a tower, the crook-backed ash seedlings where
the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, molting turkeys picking up refuse about
the kitchen door.
Making Meanings
A Wagner Matinée
1. Georgiana says about music, “Don’t love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken
from you.” How do you feel about her attitude?
2. Locate passages in which Clark, the first-person narrator, actually acts as
an omniscient narrator. How would you characterize Clark? Why do you think
Cather didn’t use a woman’s voice to tell this story?
3. In contrast to the music and the concert hall is the emotional effect of the
Nebraska frontier—the setting we hear about over and over again in the story.
How does Cather want you to feel about the Nebraska setting? What specific
images create this “feeling”?
4. Summarize in your own words what you think Clark “understands” at the end of
the story.
5. What seems to be Cather’s theme in the story? How would you say the central
episode of the concert contributes to this theme?
6. Would you have attended the concert or avoided it? Why? (Refer to your
Quickwrite notes from Before You Read in your answer.)
7. If this story were told by a Romantic, how would Aunt Georgiana’s visit to
Boston have turned out? How do you think a Romantic writer would have described
the Nebraska farm setting?