Cather and Opera

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In the course of her fiction, Willa Cather mentioned forty-three operas. References to opera appear in all but three of her twelve novels and roughly half of her short fiction. Despite a dearth of musical education-she was an indifferent piano student in her youth-Cather produced astute writing about opera beginning in her earliest criticism and continuing throughout her career. She counted opera stars among her close friends, and her literary executor and partner Edith Lewis recounted that the two of them "went constantly to the opera, " even in the early days, before Cather's success, "when the future seemed so uncertain" and attendance at performances represented a financial sacrifice. David McKay Powell's Cather and Opera offers the first book-length scholarly study of what drew Cather so powerfully and repeatedly to opera as an artistic form. With close attention to her fiction and criticism, Powell posits that at the heart of both Cather's work and the operatic corpus dwells an innate tension between high artistic ideals and popular acceptance, often figured as a clash between compositional integrity and raw, personal emotion. Considering her connection to opera in both intertextual and historical terms, Cather and Opera investigates how operatic references function in her writing, along with what the opera meant to Cather throughout her life, to find value in the complicated natures of art and the artist"--