A Wagner Matinee

By Willa Cather

Uprooted from a well-ordered life in Virginia when she was nine, Willa Cather came of age in the West during the last years of the American frontier. She developed a love for the beauty of the open grassland and an abiding interest in the Old World customs of her neighbors, the dreamers and builders who inhabit her fiction. This collection includes work from the early part of Cather's career and clearly marks themes and landscapes that she would detail and explore for the remainder of her life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Apr 28, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061917363

Willa Cather

WILLA CATHER (1873–1947), the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of more than fifteen books, was one of the most distinguished American writers of the early twentieth century.

Reviews for A Wagner Matinee

[edwinbcn · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wagner matinee is a short story, published separately, taken from Youth and the Bright Medusa, by Willa Cather.What I like about Cather's is its freshness. This straightforward story is about a woman, who has been living on a farm in rural America for more than 30 years, and visits the a concert with her nephew or cousin in a big city. While the young man fears how she might like the music by Wagner, she is moved to tears, and overcome by emotion as the concert ends. The story shows part of the tragedy of (im-) migrants who once lived in cultured centres, moving to rural outposts and being cut off from the cultural life in the cities.