What one strives for is so far away, so beautiful”-she lifted her shoulders with a long breath, folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at him with a resignation which made her face noble-“that there’s nothing one can say about it, Dr. We stand for things that are irreconcilable, absolutely.” “You see, Doctor Archie, what one really 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. How can I get much satisfaction out of the enthusiasm of a house that likes her atrociously bad performance at the same time it pretends to like mine ? If they like her, then they ought to hiss me off the stage. Yet she’s quite as popular as Necker, who’s a great artist. I give you my word she’s as stupid as an owl and as coarse as a pig, and anyone who knows anything about singing would see that in an instant. ‘Such a beautiful volume of tone !’ they say. She’s new here and the people are wild about her. Look at that woman who sang Ortrud with me last week. You find plenty of good voices in common women, with common minds and common hearts. “You see,” “voices are accidental things. After fervently defending her hatred of “the cheap thing” and her vital love of “the good thing,” she continues to elaborate on the beliefs that have driven her pursuit of music from Moonstone to Chicago, Dresden, and New York.

1In the last section of Willa Cather’s third novel, The Song of the Lark (1915), the heroine Thea Kronborg explains her struggle to distinguish good voices from cheap imitations and her desire to reach the right audience at New York’s Metropolitan Opera house to her old friend from Moonstone, Colorado, Doctor Howard Archie.

Willa cather novel the song of the