Willa Cather's The Song of the Lark

 In the annals of literary Wagnerism, Willa Cather occupies a category all her own.

--Alex Ross. Wagnerism (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)  

The summer went well beyond her hopes, however.  She told herself it was the best summer of her life, so far.  Nobody was sick at home, and her lessons were uninterrupted.  Now that she had four pupils of her own and made a dollar a week, her practising was regarded more seriously by her household.  Her mother had always arranged things so that she could have the parlour four hours a day in the summer.

Thea's life at the Ottenberg ranch was simple and full of life, like the days themselves.  She awoke every morning when the first fierce shafts of sunlight darted through the curtainless windows of the room at her ranch-house.  After breakfast she took her lunch-basket and went down to the canyon.  Usually she did not return until sunset.

--Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark (1915)

The Song of the Lark is a beautifully told story of Thea Kronborg's travel from a small town in Colorado to a successful life as an opera singer, especially of Wagner.  She has some good teachers in Moonstone, where she grew up in a Swedish family, and loves the plains as well as the music in the small Mexican community in the town.  From there she is able to go to Chicago to study, then spends time with her boyfriend in Arizona, exploring the cliff dwellings of Native Americans, and eventually to Germany to study before returning to America.  

Cather suggests parallels between the beauty of the American landscape and the power and beauty of Wagner's music, among other important influences on Kronberg's life, with its many sacrifices for her art.  She almost marries, until she discovers that her lover, Fred Ottenberg, is already married and can't escape (though an epilogue suggests that they eventually do marry).  At the end of the novel Kronborg sings Sieglinde in Wagner's Die Walkure and all the important influential figures in her life are there.