"A Wagner Matinee" is near the conclusion of Willa Cather's The Troll Garden. It directly precedes "Paul's Case", the last story in the collection.
II.
Georgiana Carpenter has travelled from Nebraska to visit her nephew Clark, in Boston. Her purpose is to resolve an estate matter.
Some thirty years earlier, Georgiana had taught music at the Boston Conservatory. Along had come Howard Carpenter, igniting "one of those extravagant passions which a handsome country boy of twenty-one sometimes inspires in an angular, spectacled woman of thirty." <1>
Very much against her family's wishes, Georgiana eloped with the penniless Carpenter, to the Nebraska frontier. She bore the hardships of raising a family in the frontier with stoic faith. "She was a pious woman; she had the consolations of religion and, to her at least, her martyrdom was not wholly sordid."
Now, while she's in the city, Clark has arranged to take his aunt to a matinee Wagner programme by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Clark observes his aunt closely as the selections are played. "The first number was the Tannhauser overture... my aunt Georgiana clutched my coat sleeve [and] I first realized that for her this broke a silence of thirty years; the inconceivable silence of the plains." Through passages from Tristan and Isolde, The Flying Dutchman, the Ring, and Siegfried's funeral march, Georgiana looks on, and finally breaks down in quiet tears.
The concert ends. "I spoke to my aunt. She burst into tears and sobbed pleadingly. 'I don't want to go, Clark, I don't want to go!' I understood. For her, just outside the door of the concert hall, lay the black pond with the cattle-tracked bluffs...the crook-backed ash seedlings where the dish-clothes hung to dry; the gaunt, moulting turkeys picking up refuse about the kitchen door."
III.
Georgiana is drawn to romantic excess. Such an attraction suggests a soul that might also be responsive to the irrational. In the event, Georgiana has been driven from her cultured world as music teacher, to the monotone isolation of the frontier. It has become an existence, she tells her nephew, that she cannot bear to return to. But sadly, there's really nowhere else to go.
IV.
"A Wagner Matinee" holds its own in The Troll Garden. It will be of special interest as prelude, to admirers of "Paul's Case".
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<1>Cather, Willa. "A Wagner Matinee". The Troll Garden (1905), in Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction 1892-1912. University of Nebraska Press, 1970.
