A Wagner Matinee Flashcards
by Willa Cather — tap or click to flip
Flashcard Review
Flashcards: A Wagner Matinee
Why does Clark's Uncle Howard write to him at the beginning of the story?
Howard writes to inform Clark that Aunt Georgiana has been left a small legacy by a recently deceased bachelor relative and needs to travel to Boston to settle the estate.
How does Clark react when he reads the letter from Uncle Howard?
He feels suddenly like a stranger to his present life in Boston, mentally reverting to the gangling farm boy his aunt had known, with cracked hands and chilblains.
What is Aunt Georgiana's physical condition when she arrives at the train station?
She arrives exhausted and disoriented after traveling in a day coach, her linen duster black with soot and her bonnet gray with dust. She barely recognizes Clark.
What does Clark plan as a treat for Aunt Georgiana during her Boston visit?
He plans to take her to a Wagner matinee performed by the Symphony Orchestra that afternoon, hoping to repay her for the musical experiences she shared with him as a boy.
What is Aunt Georgiana preoccupied with instead of the excitement of returning to Boston?
She worries about practical farm matters she left behind: leaving instructions about feeding half-skimmed milk to old Maggie's weakling calf and a freshly opened kit of mackerel that might spoil.
What is the first piece of music performed at the concert, and how does Aunt Georgiana react?
The first piece is the Tannhauser overture. When the Pilgrim's chorus begins, she clutches Clark's coat sleeve, breaking a silence of thirty years.
What causes Aunt Georgiana to weep during the concert?
She begins crying when the tenor sings the 'Prize Song,' a melody she already knew from a young German farmhand who had once sung it at the homestead.
What are Aunt Georgiana's final words in the story?
After the concert ends and people file out, she bursts into tears and pleads, 'I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!' expressing her dread of returning to the barren prairie life.
What was Aunt Georgiana's profession before she moved to Nebraska?
She was a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory during the latter 1860s.
How did Aunt Georgiana and Howard Carpenter end up on the Nebraska frontier?
She fell in love with Howard, an idle young country boy, while visiting the Green Mountains. She eloped with him to a homestead in Red Willow County, fifty miles from the railroad.
How did Aunt Georgiana nurture Clark's education on the farm?
She would stand at her ironing board until midnight hearing him recite Latin, read Shakespeare to him, gave him her mythology textbook, and taught him scales and exercises on the parlor organ.
What does Clark reveal about his debt to Aunt Georgiana?
He says he owed her most of the good that ever came his way in his boyhood, and he holds a reverential affection for her.
Who is the young German farmhand, and what role does he play in the story?
He is a tramp cowpuncher who had sung in the chorus at Bayreuth as a boy. He sang the 'Prize Song' on Sunday mornings at the farm, keeping Aunt Georgiana's connection to music alive before he disappeared.
What does Aunt Georgiana warn young Clark about loving music?
She tells him, 'Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you,' and prays that whatever sacrifice he must make, it will not be the loss of music.
How does the story explore the theme of sacrifice?
Aunt Georgiana sacrificed her career as a music teacher and her entire cultural life in Boston when she eloped to the Nebraska frontier, trading art and civilization for thirty years of grueling farm labor.
What does the contrast between Boston and Red Willow County represent in the story?
It represents the opposition between civilization and the frontier, between a life of art, music, and culture and one of physical hardship, isolation, and spiritual deprivation.
How does the story portray the resilience of artistic sensibility?
Despite thirty years of deprivation, Aunt Georgiana's response to the concert shows that her capacity for aesthetic feeling was dormant rather than dead, like moss that grows green again when placed in water.
What is the significance of Aunt Georgiana's gentle reproach, 'And you have been hearing this ever since you left me, Clark?'
It reveals her awareness of everything she has missed and the gulf between her life of deprivation and Clark's life of cultural access, making it the saddest line in the story.
What simile does Cather use to describe Aunt Georgiana's dormant soul reawakening?
She compares it to 'that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and yet, if placed in water, grows green again.'
How does Cather use the Rameses simile to characterize Aunt Georgiana at the concert hall?
She compares Georgiana to a granite statue of Rameses watching the 'froth and fret' around his pedestal, suggesting she is separated from modern life by decades of isolation, much as the statue is by centuries.
What is the effect of Cather's detailed imagery of the Nebraska homestead?
Images like the black pond, rain-gullied clay banks, naked house, and dwarf ash seedlings create a stark, desolate landscape that makes the reader feel the bleakness Georgiana will return to.
How does Cather use the metaphor of the cornfield to describe the prairie world?
She writes 'to the east, a cornfield that stretched to daybreak; to the west, a corral that reached to sunset,' using hyperbole and parallel structure to convey the overwhelming, monotonous vastness of frontier life.
What does the word 'semi-somnambulant' mean as used to describe Aunt Georgiana?
It means in a half-sleepwalking state, suggesting Georgiana is so disoriented and exhausted from her journey that she moves through her surroundings without fully perceiving them.
What does 'trepidation' mean in the context of Clark's feelings before the concert?
It means a feeling of fear or anxiety about something that is about to happen. Clark fears his aunt might feel embarrassed by her appearance or overwhelmed by the experience.
What does the word 'jocularity' mean as Clark uses it when speaking to his aunt during intermission?
It means humor or lightheartedness. Clark attempts a joking tone when he says they have come to better things than the old Trovatore, trying to ease the emotional intensity.
What is the significance of Aunt Georgiana's plea 'I don't want to go' at the story's end?
It operates on two levels: she literally does not want to leave the concert hall, and she figuratively does not want to return to the bleak, music-deprived life on the Nebraska prairie.
What does Aunt Georgiana mean when she says, 'Don't love it so well, Clark, or it may be taken from you'?
She is speaking from personal experience, warning Clark that loving music too deeply makes its loss unbearable, as she knows from having her own musical life taken away by frontier hardship.
What does Clark mean when he describes the 'conquests of peace, dearer bought than those of war'?
He means that the settlers' struggle to tame the prairie exacted a personal cost -- in spirit, health, and lost opportunities -- that rivaled or exceeded the sacrifices of war.