A Wagner Matinee

"The name of my Aunt Georgiana opened before me a gulf of recollection so wide and deep that, as the letter dropped from my hand, I felt suddenly a stranger to all the present conditions of my existence, wholly ill at ease and out of place amid the familiar surroundings of my study." 

Clark's memories are a focal point in Cather's story, where they commonly deepen our understanding of character and setting; his descriptions of earlier interactions with his aunt, for instance, provide a reference point for how much she has changed over the years. They are also important in and of themselves, however, because the characters in the story display such a clear longing for the past. Although Clark's time in Nebraska was unhappy in many ways, his relationship with Georgiana was clearly one of the high points of his life. The reminder of her is therefore so powerful that it actually makes him "ill at ease" with his current circumstances (though they seem, on the whole, to be happy).

"As for myself, I saw my aunt's battered figure with that feeling of awe and respect with which we behold explorers who have left their ears and fingers north of Franz-Joseph-Land, or their health somewhere along the Upper Congo." 

Clark's comparison of Georgiana to explorers traversing remote arctic regions and jungles underscores just how isolated and physically taxing her life on the frontier has been. In a story that deals so heavily with music, however, Clark's remark about losing "ears and fingers" is particularly suggestive, since those are body parts associated with, respectively, listening to and playing music. In fact, it will soon become clear that Georgiana has lost much of the physical dexterity necessary to play on a keyboard, although she retains the capacity to appreciate the playing of others. 

"They built a dug-out in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions."

Although we will eventually learn that Georgiana has not "reverted to primitive conditions," this passage helps establish a tension between the harsh world of the American frontier and "civilized" pursuits like music; Clark implies that there is something about the very fact of living in a dug-out that causes people to devolve into a "primitive" state. The passage also hints subtly at how unfulfilling Georgiana's life in Nebraska has been. Although the term "inmate" could simply mean "resident," it had already acquired the more modern sense of "involuntary resident" by the time Cather was writing. Furthermore, the location of the house "in a hillside" (i.e. underground) evokes images of burial, particularly as the story progresses and it becomes clear that Georgiana has been leading a kind of living death. 

"It was to her, at her ironing or mending, that I read my first Shakespeare, and her old text-book on mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands. She taught me my scales and exercises on the little parlour organ which her husband had bought her after fifteen years during which she had not so much as seen a musical instrument." 

Clark's relationship with Georgiana—though clearly deep—is ambiguous in many ways; we do not know how old he was when he first came to Nebraska, or even whether he is related to Georgiana by blood or marriage. What is clear, however, is that Georgiana provided Clark with his first taste of "higher" pleasures like literature and music. In the context of the work Clark was doing on the farm at the time, the lessons described in this passage become particularly significant, providing a spiritual escape from the physically-demanding labor of herding and husking.

"Once when I had been doggedly beating out some easy passages from an old score of Euryanthe I had found among her music books, she came up to me and, putting her hands over my eyes, gently drew my head back upon her shoulder, saying tremulously, ‘Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you.’"

Other than her final admission that she doesn't want to leave the concert hall, this passage is the closest Georgiana comes to acknowledging that she regrets her decision to marry and move to Nebraska. Interestingly, however, she does not caution Clark against making a similar choice, but instead warns him to avoid giving himself over too completely to music (or presumably, any other source of intense pleasure). This is perhaps a reflection of the fact that Cather portrays loss and disillusionment as inevitable, regardless of one's choices. As a result, Georgiana seems to suggest, it is better to avoid caring deeply for anything in the first place. The action she takes in covering Clark's eyes is significant in this respect, since it recalls the motif of sleep—the implication being that it is better to never "wake" to a pleasure at all. Whether the story as a whole endorses this view is debatable, however, since it also suggests that avoiding emotionally and spiritually-intense experiences is itself a kind of death. 

"At two o'clock the Symphony Orchestra was to give a Wagner program, and I intended to take my aunt; though, as I conversed with her, I grew doubtful about her enjoyment of it […] She questioned me absently about various changes in the city, but she was chiefly concerned that she had forgotten to leave instructions about feeding half-skimmed milk to a certain weakling calf." 

Although Clark later admits that his impressions were wrong, the above passage helps explain why he initially feared that Georgiana had lost the capacity to appreciate music. During Clark's first extended conversation with her, Georgiana not only shows little interest in the concert, but also seems entirely preoccupied with the details of her life in Nebraska. Since the story establishes an opposition between the dreary, heavily-physical life Georgiana leads in Nebraska and the more spiritual realm of music, it is not unreasonable of Clark to assume that decades of frontier life have numbed his aunt to music's effects.

"She sat looking about her with eyes as impersonal, almost as stony, as those with which the granite Rameses in a museum watches the froth and fret that ebbs and flows about his pedestal." 

Clark's comparison of his aunt to "Rameses" (i.e. Ramses—the name of several Egyptian pharaohs) speaks in part to how much the world has changed in the time that she has been living on the frontier. She now appears as out of place in Boston—her one-time home—as a pharaoh who lived thousands of years ago would. However, by likening Georgiana to a statue (and one of someone long dead), Clark also hints at how cold and death-like his aunt's current state is. In this respect, the comparison of the life that surrounds her as "froth and fret that ebbs and flows" is significant; Clark will eventually use similarly watery imagery to describe the music that brings Georgiana back into the world of the living.

"With the battle between the two motives, with the frenzy of the Venusberg theme and its ripping of strings, there came to me an overwhelming sense of the waste and wear we are so powerless to combat." 

Music is a powerful force in "A Wagner Matinée," with the ability to elicit new and higher forms of thought and feeling. With that said, music's beauty can also remind people of the gap between the idealized world it evokes and the world that exists in physical reality. This seems to be the case in this passage because Tannhäuser, broadly speaking, is an opera about the tension between ideal, "pure" love and earthly, sexual love. These opposing forces are embodied in the dueling "motives" Clark refers to here, with the one symbolizing worldly love—the Venusberg theme—apparently reminding Clark of his aunt's decline. The passage, then, is another hint that Georgiana's disillusionment is a function not only of having given up music, but also of her marriage, which has not lived up to her romantic ideals.

"When I had fallen ill with a fever in her house she used to sit by my cot in the evening […] and sing "Home to our mountains, O, let us return!" in a way fit to break the heart of a Vermont boy near dead of homesickness already."

The above passage brings together two major themes in "A Wagner Matinée": the power of music, and the longing to return to a lost past. For both Georgiana and Clark, this past also corresponds to a physical location—Clark misses his home in Vermont, while Georgiana misses Boston and the job she had there—making Georgiana's choice of song a fitting one. At the same time, however, it is striking that the music in this passage simply affirms (rather than resolves) Clark and Georgiana's feelings, since Cather, elsewhere, suggests that music has the power to transport its listeners to other places and times, and we might expect music to serve as an antidote to homesickness and nostalgia. Ultimately, however, the story suggests that there are limits to art's powers to lift us out of ourselves, although there may be (and seems to be, in this passage) a kind of painful consolation to be found in art that reminds us of our own situation.

"Her fingers worked mechanically upon her black dress, as if, of themselves, they were recalling the piano score they once played. Poor hands! They had been stretched and twisted into mere tentacles to hold and lift and knead with;—on one of them a thin, worn band that had once been a wedding ring." 

Georgiana's misshapen hands encapsulate the physical and emotional wear-and-tear of the life she has led. Where she once used her hands to produce music—an uplifting and spiritual activity—she now uses them for more mundane physical activities. What's more, this "holding," "lifting," and "kneading" seem to have affected Georgiana's ability to play on a more-than-physical level; as she "plays" in this passage, her hands move "mechanically," as if she were doing mindless chores. The reference to the "thin, worn band that had once been a wedding ring" is also significant, in that it ties Georgiana's physical and psychological deterioration not only to the loss of her music, but also to the (probable) loss of her romantic hopes. Clark's depiction of Georgiana's husband is not particularly flattering, so the state of Georgiana's wedding ring likely symbolizes its wearer's disillusionment with the husband she sacrificed so much for.  

"It never really died, then—the soul which can suffer so excruciatingly and so interminably." 

On the face of it, it seems strange that Clark reacts with apparent relief to the realization that Georgiana has a soul that can "suffer." This makes sense, however, given that the story depicts art as eliciting precisely the kind of transcendent emotions which make the drudgery of daily life more painful by contrast, but which are nevertheless essential to living a full life. Clark therefore sees Georgiana's pain as evidence that life on the frontier has not entirely "killed" her spirit.

"The deluge of sound poured on and on; I never knew what she found in the shining current of it; I never knew how far it bore her, or past what happy islands. From the trembling of her face I could well believe that before the last number she had been carried out where the myriad graves are, into the grey, nameless burial grounds of the sea; or into some world of death vaster yet, where, from the beginning of the world, hope has lain down with hope and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept." 

The above passage, which comes at the climax of "A Wagner Matinée," ties together several of the story's most important themes and motifs. In it, Cather not only repeats the earlier association between music and water but doubles down on it by making it more literal: Wagner's Ring Cycle ends in an enormous flood. However, where Clark earlier depicted water (and by extension music) as life-giving, he here ultimately links both to death; the music transports Georgiana past "happy islands" (perhaps memories of her youth) before taking her out "into the grey, nameless burial grounds of the sea; or into some world of death vaster yet." This, again, speaks to the ambivalent power of art in Cather's story, since both the subject of the music and its sheer emotional power seem to remind Georgiana of the spiritual "death" that waits for her back home. Finally, the passage brings back the motif of sleep (previously associated with Georgiana's life in Nebraska) and uses it as a metaphor for death, further underscoring what is at stake in returning to the frontier.

"The men of the orchestra went out one by one, leaving the stage to the chairs and music stands, empty as a winter cornfield."

In addition to being a good example of Cather's use of simile, the above passage sets up the story's final words by likening the bare chairs and music stands to bare cornstalks in winter. As we will soon see, the comparison not only paints a vivid picture, but also hints at the fact that Georgiana views leaving the concert hall as a return to ordinary life in Nebraska. What's more, this passage contrasts fittingly with Clark's comparison of the orchestra to a "forest," and its music to water; whereas those earlier descriptions connect the concert to living and/or life-giving things, the "winter cornfield" suggests barrenness and death.