The song of the lark
By: Willa Cather ; edited with an introduction and notes by Sherrill Harbison.
Contributors: Harbison, Sherrill.
Series: Penguin twentieth-century classics
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 1999
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 434
Subjects: Women singers -- Fiction; Children of clergy -- Fiction; Swedish Americans -- Fiction; Young women -- Fiction; Opera -- Fiction; Chicago (Ill.) -- Fiction; Colorado -- Fiction
Description: "Conflating her own childhood experiences with those of a celebrated Wagnerian soprano of her day, Willa Cather here introduces Thea Kronborg, a Scandinavian-American singer who rises from a one-story town in Colorado to the Metropolitan Opera House. Along the way she learns her own capacity for the rigorous demands of artistic excellence, and how few of her colleagues are willing to sacrifice ordinary vanities for exacting professional standards.

Exhausted and depressed by the mediocrity around her, she seeks respite in the southwestern desert, where she has the epiphany that will transform her vision and her art. Characteristically, Cather uses the western landscape in The Song of the Lark both to reflect her heroine's inner life and to fire her imagination."--BOOK JACKET.