Will I love The Song of the Lark?

Only through a novel can a long-dead writer convey to a Texas farm boy what it is like to be a great opera singer. As much as I celebrate popular fiction, on rare occasions beautifully constructed prose pulls me to an author like Willa Cather. Like many of her fans, My Ántonia won me over. Song of the Lark paints a portrait of the artist, and it is not always beautiful. Talent drives an artist to perfection. They derive no satisfaction from the merely good. They can be insensitive, exacting and rude because the artist suffers pain from witnessing anything… show more.

I find this to be the perfect book about an artist’s coming of age in a different time and place. Thea, a young woman living long ago on the American prairie, is discovered to have musical genius. She nurtured, pushed, and even loved while everyone around her knew that her destiny lay out in the wider world, onstage. 

In this novel, in five parts, Thea learns to leave her Colorado antecedents to make it big as an opera singer. Thea develops a relationship with music from an early age, yet something about home always calls to her and, in a way, cannot leave her. 

As she travels to Chicago, New York, and Europe, keeping the small Colorado town distant in geography and memory, it always finds a way back into her life, often in beautiful ways. Leaving is a sacrifice she felt she had to make for her art, and the relationship between artist and craft is featured… show more.