The prima donna in fiction – Part 2 ‘The Song of the Lark’

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark, (London: Virago, 1982 [orig. 1915])

Of Rutherford’s types of the fictional prima donna,[1] Thea Kronborg is the professional artist and exalted diva. Atherton’s Margarethe Styr is seen at the stage of her career where she is the successful singer; the main part of Cather’s novel is taken up with the growth of the artist: ‘the artists’s awakening and struggle; her floundering escape from a smug, domestic, self-satisfied provincial world of utter ignorance.’ (viii)

Cather’s novel is an entertaining Bildungsroman in itself, but it also presents a picture of the prima donna which readers would have found believable, and would have appropriated to form their own understandings of the prima donnas they encountered in reality.

The prima donna has talent – the innate something special. During a lesson with her piano teacher, the alcoholic Wunsch, Thea’s interest in opera is piqued by an examination of the score of Gluck’s Orpheus. Wunsch sees that she has the special something that will make her great.

That special something is the instinctual connection she has with art. Thea realises her voice connects her with her personality. ‘Her voice, more than any other part of her, had to do with that confidence, that sense of wholeness and inner well-being that she had felt at moments ever since she could remember.’ (p. 272) As she discovers more about her art she realises that this connection is not just emotional but involves her whole body: ‘She had begun to understand that – with her, at least – voice was, first of all, vitality; a lightness in the body and a driving force in the blood. If she had that, she could sing.’ (p. 381)

Thea goes one step further and learns what that connection means. While staying in the cliff-dwellings of ancient native Americans in Arizona, Thea discovers the theoretical context for her art in the work of women in past millennia. The ancient women whose dwelling she lives in made pots to contain precious water, crafted vessels to hold the essence of life:

The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself – life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?... In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it in one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals. (p. 378)

Thea’s progress also demonstrates the character of the prima donna. Her supporter and patron, Doctor Archie, tells her that if she wants to succeed she has to work hard: ‘… if you want a big thing, you’ve got to have nerve enough to cut out all that’s easy, everything that’s to be had cheap.’ (p. 306) Thea knows that only she can put in the work, that she will stand or fall by her own efforts. ‘Everybody’s up against it for himself, succeeds or fails – himself.’ (p. 155) And when she is on her way to success there will still be sacrifices; her father dies while she is studying in Europe, and when her mother is dying she is unable to visit her because she had been given the role of Elisabeth (Tannhäuser) in Dresden, which she knew was her big break.

But the sacrifice is worth it. Thea knows that it will help her get away from the small-town mediocrity that will be her lot if she doesn’t try: ‘She had better take it into her own hands and lose everything than meekly draw the plough under the rod of parental guidance. She had seen it when she was at home last summer – the hostility of comfortable, self-satisfied people toward any serious effort.’ (p. 382). But the ultimate prize is the pleasure of being yourself. Thea explains to her friend Fred Ottenbury that it is not the horror of married life that makes her want to avoid it: ‘It’s waking up every morning with the feeling that your life is your own, and your strength is your own, and your talent is your own; that you’re all there, and there’s no sag in you.’ (p. 394)

The need to realise her own personality has always been Thea’s motivation, and this is recognised by her piano teacher in Chicago, Andor Harsanyi: ‘I believe that the strongest need of your nature is to find yourself, to emerge as yourself. Until I heard you sing, I wondered how you were to do this, but it has grown clearer to me every day.’ (p. 263)

Thea also demonstrates the prima donna’s temperament. She has difficulty with routine rehearsal schedules. ‘Every single feature of operatic routine is detrimental to me. I usually go on like a horse that’s been fixed to lose a race.’ (p. 544) After Archie sees her sing Elsa (Lohengrin) at the Met, he visits her and is surprised by her exhaustion, ‘rather dazed, and pretty well used up’ (p. 508). She assures him, ‘This is not I.’ (p. 506). Archie is till shocked, but Ottenbury points out that she received him after a performance, ‘When she’d have kicked any other man down the elevator shaft, if I know her.’ (p. 510) The circumstances of her first Sieglinde (Die Walküre) show her as the intense professional. One night she is entertaining Ottenbury and Archie when she is summoned to the Met, to replace the scheduled singer who has fallen ill. After travelling with her to the house, Archie comments, ‘She looked frightened… but I thought she looked – determined.’ (p. 529)

What many readers may have overlooked is a contradiction voiced by Thea towards the end of the novel: ‘“I don’t see why people go to the opera, anyway,” she said suddenly. “I suppose they get something, or think they do.”’ (p. 542) Artist and audience have contrary expectations: ‘… what one strives for in art is not the sort of thing you are likely to find when you drop in for a performance at the opera. What one strives for is so far away, so beautiful—… that there’s nothing one can say about it.’ (p. 551) The artist and the audience have different experiences, and it is a mistake to think that because they happen in the same place, that they are the same thing.

[By the way, it is a beautiful book and a great work of literature– worth reading even if you’re not into opera.]

[1] Susan Rutherford, The Prima Donna and Opera, 1815-1930, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 31.