“A Wagner Matinee,” by Willa Cather is a powerful but heart wrenching message about loss and gain.
The protagonist, an aunt of the narrator Clark, has come home to Boston to attend a funeral. She has lived most of her life in the Great Plains of Nebraska.
When she returned to her duties in Boston, Howard followed her, and the upshot of this inexplicable infatuation was that she eloped with him, eluding the reproaches of her family and the criticisms of her friends by going with him to the Nebraska frontier. Carpenter, who, of course, had no money, had taken a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the railroad. There they had measured off their quarter section themselves by driving across the prairie in a wagon, to the wheel of which they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting off its revolutions. They built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions. Their water they got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirty years my aunt had not been further than fifty miles from the homestead.
She loved Howard, she still loves Howard. But she had to give up so much! An accomplished pianist, she had not been to an Opera or Concert in three decades.
But this kind old lady, who did not play in Philadelphia or Boston or New York, played for Clark, the narrator, and changed his life.
I owed to this woman most of the good that ever came my way in my boyhood, and had a reverential affection for her. During the years when I was riding herd for my uncle, my aunt, after cooking the three meals–the first of which was ready at six o’clock in the morning-and putting the six children to bed, would often stand until midnight at her ironing board, with me at the kitchen table beside her, hearing me recite Latin declensions and conjugations, gently shaking me when my drowsy head sank down over a page of irregular verbs. It was to her, at her ironing or mending, that I read my first Shakespeare’, and her old textbook on mythology was the first that ever came into my empty hands. She taught me my scales and exercises, too–on the little parlor organ, which her husband had bought her after fifteen years, during which she had not so much as seen any instrument, but an accordion that belonged to one of the Norwegian farmhands. She would sit beside me by the hour, darning and counting while I struggled with the “Joyous Farmer,” but she seldom talked to me about music, and I understood why. She was a pious woman; she had the consolations of religion and, to her at least, her martyrdom was not wholly sordid.
It was not easy, for sure. His old aunt struggled.
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. Oh, dear boy, pray that whatever your sacrifice may be, it be not that.”
Home school, parents, what have you given up to do what you do? Has it been worth it? I think so.
Clark takes his aunt to a Wagner afternoon opera. It was wonderful! But it was not real. What was real was Nebraska and Howard.
I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs; the tall, unpainted house, with weather-curled boards; naked as a tower, the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dishcloths hung to dry; the gaunt, molting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door.
Does home schooling feel that way? Oh it is exciting enough at the state conventions and on Monday morning. But what about Friday morning when no one has his essay written and Tuesday night when you discover that your daughter forgot to make supper and Thursday noon when you find you misplaced the CD story you had planned for lunch?
That is when in Nebraska you need a Wagnerian Opera to remind you of where you have come and where you are going