Conflating her own childhood experiences with those of a celebrated Wagnerian soprano of her day, Willa Cather here introduces Thea Kronborg, a Scandinavian-American singer who rises from a one-story town in Colorado to the Metropolitan Opera House. Along the way she learns her own capacity for the rigorous demands of artistic excellence, and how few of her colleagues are willing to sacrifice ordinary vanities for exacting professional standards. Exhausted and depressed by the mediocrity around her, she seeks respite in the southwestern desert, where she has the epiphany that will transform her vision and her art. Characteristically, Cather uses the western landscape in The Song of the Lark both to reflect her heroine's inner life and to fire her imagination.