In Cather's "A Wagner Matinee," the narrator Clark takes his aging aunt Georgiana to a concert in Boston. Georgiana was once a music teacher at the Boston Conservatory but gave up her career to marry; since then, she has lived a physically grueling and socially isolated existence on a farm in Nebraska. When she first arrives in Boston, she seems dazed and disinterested in her surroundings, and Clark begins to think that a life of deprivation has numbed her once spiritually and emotionally intense relationship to music.

Georgiana's response to the first piece in the program—the "Pilgrim's Chorus" from Tannhauser—is one of the first indications that Clark's worries are misplaced: she clutches her nephew's arm as the horns begin playing, apparently overwhelmed by strong emotion. Her grip doesn't loosen throughout the first piece, and as the violins take up the melody, Clark finds himself thinking about the desolate and lonely landscape of Nebraska, as well as the inevitable "waste and wear" of human life.

Significantly, the plot of Tannhauser functions partly as a warning against shallow or sordid infatuation; the implication, then, is that Georgiana might have thrown away her life's vocation for a romance that ultimately proved disappointing. The passage also draws the reader's attention to Georgiana's hands, which are a recurring motif in the story. Where Georgiana's hands were dexterous during her days as a pianist, they're now misshapen through years of hard farm labor. They therefore serve as a tangible reminder of what Georgiana has lost over the years—not just the joy of hearing music but even the ability to play it herself.