The Song of the Lark Annotated by Willa Cather

The Song of the Lark is a 1915 novel by Willa Cather. It is the second part of a thematic trilogy by Cather which tells stories of women in the emerging prairies of the American West. The trilogy is considered to be some of Cather's finest work, celebrated for bringing to life the rural West and its people in a way that had never been done before.

The book follows the life of Thea Kronborg as she grows up in a small American prairie town and follows her ambition to be an internationally renowned singer. Thea's story is a combination of Cather's own autobiographical experiences growing up in Nebraska and the life of a famous Scandinavian-American opera singer named Olive Fremstad.

The novel is divided into six parts. The first one recounts Thea's childhood in the fictional town of Moonstone, Colorado. When the book starts, she is eleven years old. She is the daughter of the local minister and has a reputation for being different and aloof. Though the adults in her family, particularly her mother and eccentric Aunt Tillie, are supportive of her, she has trouble getting along with her siblings and other children. She takes daily piano lessons for two to four hours a day.

Her friends are all older men in the town: her piano teacher Herr Wunsch, a drunk out-of-towner who stays with the local tailor Mr. Kohler and his wife; the local physician Dr. Archie, who once saved her life when she had pneumonia as a child; Spanish Johnny, a Mexican wandering musician who lives in the Mexican Town outside of Moonstone; and Ray Kennedy, a train conductor who dotes on Thea and is waiting for her to grow older so he can marry her.

One day, Thea plays piano at a concert in her local church and gets upset when her rival is praised above her. She continues to train with Wunsch, who first introduces her to opera. When Wunsch causes a scandal by getting drunk and wrecking Kohler's home, his students no longer want to be associated with him and he leaves town. At the young age of fifteen, Thea takes on Wunsch's piano students as a full-time teacher, dropping out of school.

Worried that Thea is not pious enough, her father makes her work at the church playing the organ and leading the hymns, a job she does not enjoy. Ray Kennedy suffers a train accident and dies, and Dr. Archie informs Mr. Kronborg that Ray's life policy listed Thea as the beneficiary. He has left her six hundred dollars, which he wishes to be spent on a proper musical education in Chicago. Thea's father reluctantly lets her go, and she heads to Chicago at the age of seventeen.

The second part of the book deals with her first winter in Chicago. A friend of her father's, Reverend Larson, gives her work singing in his church choir and at the occasional funeral. She takes piano lessons with Andor Harsanyi, a Hungarian concert pianist who takes her under his wing, along with his wife. After a few months in Chicago, she visits the Art Institute where she sees a painting called "The Song of the Lark" in which she finds inspiration, and she also goes to hear an orchestra for the first time. She experiences a moment of pure joy there, and vows to live a life that will allow her to keep experiencing that joy...

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