Kate Hopkins, A Wagnerian Novel: Willa Cather’s ‘The Song of the Lark’

On no writer has Wagner had a more powerful and positive influence than on Willa Cather (1873–1947). A music lover from childhood, she first heard his operas in the late 1890s in Pittsburgh. She quickly became an ardent enthusiast for ‘those noble, mysterious, significant dramas in roughly-made verse’. Indeed, in 1900 she went so far as to state that Wagner had ‘stung the palate so that all other styles seem insipid’. After her move to New York to work for McClure’s Magazine, she regularly attended and reviewed Wagner performances at the Metropolitan Opera, and interviewed singers who participated in them, including the dramatic soprano Olive Fremstad.