SOURCE: Flannigan, John H. “Words and Music Made Flesh in Cather's ‘Eric Hermannson's Soul.’” Studies in Short Fiction 32, no. 2 (spring 1995): 209–16.

[In the following essay, Flannigan argues that Cather's insertion of references to the opera Cavalleria Rusticana is a fundamental element to understand the title character of “Eric Hermannson's Soul.”]

As the first story Willa Cather placed in a national magazine (Cosmopolitan, April 1900), “Eric Hermannson's Soul” represents an important milestone in her career. According to Cather's biographer James Woodress, it is “a very competent piece of fiction and marks a clear advance in her narrative skill” (144-45). Bruce Baker argues that the story also provides an important reminder of Cather's belief, at least early in her writing career, that Nebraska was a “cultural desert … a place indifferent if not actively hostile to man's creative spirit” (12).

The story is notable, too, for the quantity as well as the quality of its allusions to other texts. Cather filled her story with a wide range of literary and musical references; there are brief glances at, for example, Norse mythology, Anthony Hope's Prisoner of Zenda stories, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poem “The Blessed Damozel,” Tennyson's The Princess, Edvard Grieg's incidental music to Ibsen's Peer Gynt, and Methodist revival hymns, as well as to the Old and New Testaments. Music, in particular the intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, plays a critical role in the story's plot.

Certainly, Cather's familiarity with Cavalleria Rusticana—she wrote a number of articles analyzing its appeal—would have enabled her to use that opera's intermezzo as a shorthand device to import the drama's situation and thematic tensions into her story. Yet little critical attention has been paid to the suggestive power of this allusion. I believe that the progress of Eric Hermannson's soul—from prisoner of religious fundamentalism to free agent in a world filled with temptations—is given greater significance when seen against the violent, tragic backdrop supplied by Mascagni's opera. The performance of the intermezzo in the story is a crucial moment when text and music are incarnated in the character of Margaret Elliot, forever altering Eric's vision of the state of his soul.

Cather's story takes place in the town of Lone Star and describes how Eric Hermannson, “the wildest youth on the Divide,” becomes disillusioned by his involvement with Lena Hanson, a woman of dubious reputation, and joins the Free Gospellers. Asa Skinner, a reformed gambler, heads the sect, and at a revival meeting he persuades Eric to renounce sin and to smash his violin, an instrument that for the Free Gospellers represents the “very incarnation of evil” (360).

Two years later, Eric's boyhood friend Wyllis Elliot and his sister Margaret visit Lone Star. Margaret is impressed by Eric's account of his cousin's suicide. She plays the intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana for Eric on a parlor organ, and suddenly Eric breaks down and tells Margaret of his greatest sorrow—the death of his younger brother. Several days later, during a ride to retrieve the town's mail, Eric saves Margaret's life after they are surrounded by a herd of wild ponies. Although she is engaged to another man, Margaret is impressed by Eric's bravery and arranges for a party at which she successfully induces Eric to dance with her. The two enjoy a passionate moment during the dance when they climb to the top of a windmill, and after Margaret returns somewhat guiltily to the east coast to rejoin her fiance, Eric throws off the shackles of the Free Gospellers and accepts the risk of eternal damnation for his indiscretion.

The intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana is invoked at a critical moment in the story and practically assumes the role of a separate character. Margaret describes for her brother its impact on Eric.

You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was pumping away at that old parlor organ to please Mrs. Lockhart. … And of course I played the intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana for him; it goes rather better on an organ than most things do. He shuffled his feet and twisted his big hands up into knots and blurted out that he didn't know there was any music like that in the world. Why, there were tears in his voice, Wyllis! … I can't tell you what music means to that man. I never saw any one so susceptible to it. It gave him speech, he became alive.

(365-66)

Eric is moved to tell Margaret of the death of his brother; “he took up the story and told it slowly, as if to himself, just sort of rose up and told his own woe to answer Mascagni's” (366).

What is the source of this music's ability to untangle Eric's tongue? At first glance, Cather's choice seems odd, for the one-act opera Cavalleria Rusticana (1890) by Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) is a prototypical verismo opera in which blood, religion, and sex become thoroughly intertwined. The opera, which takes place against a Sicilian village's celebration of Easter, tells the story of how Turiddu is abandoned by his lover Lola when he joins the army; Lola marries Alfio during Turiddu's absence, and on his return Turiddu begins an affair with Santuzza, whom he later rejects when he recommences his affair with Lola. Santuzza tells Alfio of Turiddu's adulterous affair with Lola, and Alfio kills Turiddu in a duel. The intermezzo, played near the opera's midpoint, depicts a moment of tranquility following Santuzza and Turiddu's vituperative duet and the betrayal of her erstwhile lover as the entire village, minus the excommunicated Santuzza, attends mass.

In March 1893 Cather heard a concert performance of Mascagni's opera in Lincoln, Nebraska given by Lillian Nordica's opera company; Cather was apparently impressed by what she heard, for she referred to that performance and especially the intermezzo in a number of newspaper articles. In one review in the Lincoln Courier (7 Sep. 1895), she experimented with some interesting musical analysis, writing of the intermezzo's “bass that labors and falls and struggles, that suffers and protests in black despair; its treble that never yields, never falters, dips sometimes toward the lower octaves like a bird that is faint with its death wound, and then flies on, flies on” (Slote 162).

In Richard Giannone's analysis of “Eric Hermannson's Soul,” Cather's rather rhapsodic explanation of Mascagni's music furnishes the key to Eric's transformation. “Eric's awakening, the unyielding high melody of his soul asserting itself, is confirmed when he once again plays the violin” at the dance (20). Giannone's reading certainly has some validity because it uses Cather's own words to make its case, but it also strikes me as somewhat abstract and arbitrary. At the end of the story, we should remember, Eric believes himself damned, not transfigured, by his love for Margaret Elliot. In fact, the intermezzo's “struggling bass … that suffers and protests in black despair” seems a more appropriate metaphor for Eric's soul than the sustained melody in the treble clef. Moreover, Eric's identification with the feminine soprano range of the treble instead of the masculine bass line slackens the erotic tension Cather has otherwise carefully developed throughout the story.

I believe that neither Giannone's interpretation of Cather's review nor Cather's own recorded impression of Mascagni's music is sufficient to explain the power of the intermezzo in “Eric Hermannson's Soul.” Nor do I believe that it is useless to subject Mascagni's music to close examination in assessing Cather's fictional use of it. I agree with Jean-Jacques Nattiez that “we are never so aware of what the meaning of something in a nonlinguistic domain may be as when we attempt to explain that nonlinguistic domain in verbal terms” (9). I suggest, however, that we should look at Mascagni's opera in its totality as the sum of its sexual jealousies, its violence, its religious tensions, and its specific cultural context—all of which are effectively depicted in the purely musical intermezzo. The power in Cather's allusion emanates from the fact that these various attributes of Mascagni's opera also form an integral part of the thematic fabric in her story.

In addition to its obvious appeal as a self-contained piece of attractive orchestral music, the intermezzo provides an essential opportunity for the audience to relax after the desperate battle of the sexes just depicted on stage. It is a brief musical episode that occupies just under four minutes in the opera's overall playing time of 75 minutes. The intermezzo consists of 48 measures, divided into two halves of unequal length and entirely different sound quality, comprising 19 measures and 29 measures, respectively.

The first half is a hushed, delicate recapitulation of music heard earlier in the opera when the townspeople sing the Latin hymn “Regina coeli” in celebration of Easter. The second half, however, is based on material not heard earlier in the opera, a broad, yearning melody somewhat resembling the music of Santuzza and Turiddu's duet. Near the intermezzo's end, the music rises to the passionate climax (marked con forza by Mascagni) during which the violins play f against the relentlessly descending bass line (the episode described by Cather and Giannone) before reaching a tranquil resolution. Mascagni's scoring highlights the differences between the two halves; the organ is silent throughout the first section but joins in the second, making a significant contribution to the bass line.

The structure of the intermezzo as well as its dramatic placement—it is played while the curtain is raised showing the quiet village scene—establishes the overlapping sexual and religious tensions at work in the opera. The organ, instead of being used in the specifically liturgical first part of the intermezzo, makes its entrance in the erotically charged second part, signifying a musical merging of the sacred and the profane. Moreover, the stage tableau reminds the audience that the “Regina coeli” is being re-played for the benefit of the congregation inside the church while the intermezzo's more passionate second section exposes the psychological torments of Santuzza, Turiddu, Alfio, and Lola, all of whom are invisible to the audience. The stage is turned inside out; the audience is simultaneously attending the service inside the Church with the villagers while the private thoughts of various characters are related through an appropriately voluptuous musical vocabulary.

Even though there is no indication in Cather's story that Eric knows anything about the plot of Cavalleria Rusticana, the connection between the intermezzo's narrative power and Margaret's private organ recital for Eric is clear. Margaret tells her brother that the intermezzo has a distinctly religious quality throughout; “it goes rather better on an organ than most things do” (366). For Eric, the distance between a sophisticated woman's performance of a quasi-religious musical piece and the scandalous songs Lena Hanson once sang for him is a revelation. He can also accept Margaret's playing of Mascagni's music because the organ, although bitterly opposed by the Free Gospellers, is considered less evil than his violin (360).

The intermezzo thus represents for Eric the possibility of a reconciliation of his suppressed carnal desires for Lena Hanson and the spiritual redemption that he sought but never found with Asa Skinner and the Free Gospellers. As performer of the music that creates this synthesis, Margaret comes to symbolize the joining of these two disparate attractions in a single love-object. When Eric “blurts” out the story of his brother's death after hearing Margaret's concert, more than his tongue has been freed; sexual desire, the ability to narrate one's life, and the realization that these liberating acts constitute their own kind of spiritual salvation begin to supplant Eric's false gods.

The spiritual dimension of Eric's struggle has other links with Mascagni's opera, too, because Cather used the text of Cavalleria Rusticana to shape Eric's speech. Both Turiddu and Santuzza sing lines that apply to Eric Hermannson. At the beginning of the opera, Turiddu sings from offstage a siciliana in praise of Lola's beauty. “What tho' I forfeit life, thy presence gaining? What were the joy of heav'n, wert thou denied me!” (339).¹ Similarly, Eric tells Margaret, “I die for you tonight, tomorrow, for all eternity. I am not a coward; I was afraid because I love you more than Christ who died for me, more than I am afraid of hell, or hope for heaven” (372).

In lines that also explain Eric's relationship with Skinner, Santuzza tells Turiddu's mother Lucia that “I may not step across your threshold, I cannot pass it, I most unhappy outcast! Excommunicated!” (341). The irony in Cather's story, however, is that “excommunication” comes to mean “liberation.” Eric takes solace in the words of 2 Peter 3:8 at the story's end: “And a day shall be as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day” (379).² Eric defers the question of his soul's judgment to an authority higher than Skinner, an option unavailable to the characters in Mascagni's opera at its blood-soaked conclusion. Thus Cather emphasizes the importance of Free will as the tool enabling Eric to conquer the provincial religious fundamentalism that at first glance seems so remote From Margaret's and Mascagni's cosmopolitan worlds.

Marilyn Arnold notes that “Eric Hermannson's Soul” represents the first appearance in Cather's fiction of “prairie-born characters who yearn for the advantages of the East's more civilized lifestyle, but who nevertheless have the more vital, if cruder, West in their blood” (21). But by drawing an obvious connection between her characters and Mascagni's, Cather also makes the important point that opera is not an effete “eastern” entertainment incorporating a distorted vision of the world but echoes all human conduct under intense emotional pressure. “What is Cavalleria Rusticana but a melange of the folk music of southern Italy?,” Cather asked in 1897 (Curtin 1: 388). Eric doesn't have to know any of the opera's words in order to talk as Turiddu or Santuzza does; in such situations, Cather implies, all people—onstage or off—tend to talk alike.

Cavalleria Rusticana is also a reminder to Eric of the price paid for denying himself pleasure: the opera is a metaphor for the larger world passing him by. Cather places her story in “a year of financial depression”—probably 1893, the year in which she first wrote of Mascagni's opera (363). Yet the intermezzo—just three years old in 1893—has become only too familiar to Margaret: “of course I played the intermezzo” (366; emphasis added).³ Eric's emotional response that “he didn't know there was any music like that in the world” is echoed in a later Cather story, “A Wagner Matinee,” in which a deeply moved Georgiana Carpenter hears Wagner's music after spending most of her life in god-forsaken Red Willow County, Nebraska, and asks her nephew “and you have been hearing this [music] ever since you left me, Clark?” (100). For both of these characters, music is a cruel reminder of the distance between them and the world they once knew. For the somewhat jaded Margaret and Georgiana's nephew Clark, however, it is simply part of the cultural inheritance to which they view themselves as entitled and of which they soon begin to tire.

Cultural saturation is also apparently a two-way street. Eric's awakening to an awareness of lost possibilities through Margaret's seductive power has its parallel in the appeal of his music to her. At the dance, Eric is accompanied by the organist Minna Oleson who together play “rude, half mournful music, made up of the folksongs of the North, that the villagers sing through the long night in hamlets by the sea, when they are thinking of the sun, and the spring, and the fishermen so long away” (374). The contrast of the Peer Gynt-like music of the Norwegians to the earthy folk idiom used by Mascagni in his opera is vivid and, I think, significant in the story. Margaret, a woman “tired of the world at twenty-four,” gets a glimpse through Eric's music of a lonely world where sunlight and companionship are treasured. But not for her is the world of Eric's female ancestors, in which “a short wooing, a hasty, loveless marriage, unlimited maternity, thankless sons, premature age and ugliness, were the dower of their womanhood” (374-75).

In the final analysis, however, Eric and Margaret's moral predicament should remain the paramount question in the reader's mind. Here, Cather and Mascagni, through their respective fictional worlds, come to vastly different conclusions. Santuzza, learning of Turiddu's murder by Alfio, collapses at the end of the opera, overwhelmed by the knowledge of her complicity in his death. Eric, however, survives his infatuation with Margaret Elliot, while she, on the brink of her marriage to another man, forever will be haunted by her memory of Eric: “she gave him one swift glance that said, ‘I will not forget’” (378). Is it inappropriate for a reader to ask about the possibility of Margaret's finding happiness with her dilettante fiance after her supercharged night with Eric?

Cather's own opinion on this subject perhaps can be found in a later story. In “A Gold Slipper” (1916), the soprano Kitty Ayrshire tells the disbelieving Marshall McKann that “it does not matter much whom we live with in this world, but it matters a great deal whom we dream of” (146). Left to their dreams, Eric and Margaret can perhaps remain committed to each other in a way that would have been impossible had they actually become husband and wife.

A more important legacy, however, than the possibility of marriage is the freedom left to Eric and Margaret to seek lives different from the ones they once believed were their destinies. It is at this level, I believe, that Cather's story is most successful. Far from being merely a celebration of unbridled eros, “Eric Hermannson's Soul” depicts the analogous natures of sexual and spiritual fulfillment. By invoking the sensuousness of Mascagni's intermezzo and by extension the brutal drama from which it is drawn, Cather supplies an idealized version of physical love that carries with it a moral responsibility. In effect, Cather clothes abstract concepts like “lust,” “duty,” “fidelity,” “trust,” and “salvation” with the flesh of believable situations and recognizable characters.

Cather's story can thus be read as an allegory, but I also see it as a reminder of the richness and variety of the everyday world in which accidental meetings, music, and the act of telling our stories to willing ears constitute profound emotional and spiritual events. There are risks, to be sure, in surrendering to these moments. Instead of denying the prudence of such experiences because of the risks they carry, however, Cather invites her readers to accept such challenges with the confidence that it is a patient, not a vengeful god that will judge our conduct.

Notes

1. That the words of Cavalleria Rusticana (libretto by Tagioni-Tozzetti and Menasci after Verga) sound rather absurd in English is hardly the fault of the individual translator; according to William Weaver, the opera's characters “speak an involuted, poetic, high-flown Italian, more familiar to operatic heroes and heroines than to remote Sicilian villages” (206).

2. Bruce Baker notes how earlier in the story Skinner's “‘saving’ of Eric Hermannson's soul has in fact been a losing of it” (15).

3. It apparently became too familiar for Cather as well. Referring to the intermezzo in December 1895, she wrote “everyone who can play the piano at all plays it; and a great many people who cannot, play it just the same” (Slote 183).

Works Cited

Arnold, Marilyn. Willa Cather's Short Fiction. Athens: Ohio UP, 1984.

Baker, Brace P. “Nebraska's Cultural Desert: Willa Cather's Early Short Stories.” Midamerica: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature 14 (1987): 12-17.

Cather, Willa. “A Gold Slipper.” Youth and the Bright Medusa. New York: Vintage-Random House, 1975. 123-48.

———. “A Wagner Matinee.” The Troll Garden. Ed. James Woodress. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983. 94-101.

———. “Eric Hermannson's Soul.” Willa Cather's Collected Short Fiction 1892-1912. Ed. Virginia Faulkner. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1970. 359-79.

———. “The Passing Show.” Lincoln Courier 7 Sep. 1895. Rpt. in Slote 162-63.

———. “The Passing Show.” Nebraska State Journal 15 Dec. 1895. Rpt. in Slote 183-84.

———. “The Passing Show.” Lincoln Courier 30 Oct. 1897. Rpt. in Curtin 1: 387-89.

Curtin, William M., ed. The World and the Parish: Willa Cather's Articles and Reviews 1893-1902. 2 vols. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1970.

Giannone, Richard. Music in Willa Cather's Fiction. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1968.

Mascagni, Pietro. “Intermezzo” from Cavalleria Rusticana. Piano solo. Rev. and ed. by F. Henri Klickmann. New York: Jack Mills, 1924.

———. Cavalleria Rusticana. With Jussi Bjorling, Renata Tebaldi, and Ettore Bastianini. Cond. Alberto Erede. Maggio Musicale Fiorentino orch. and chorus. Rec. 1-7 Sep. 1957. London Historic 425 985-2, 1991.

———. Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry). The Librettos of the Italian Operas. Vol. 3 of The Opera Libretto Library. 3 vols. 1939. New York: Avenel, 1980. 3: 339-61.

Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. Trans. Carolyn Abbate. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.

Slote, Bernice, ed. The Kingdom of Art: Willa Cather's First Principles and Critical Statements 1893-1896. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1966.

Weaver, William. The Golden Century of Italian Opera from Rossini to Puccini. London: Thames and Hudson, 1980.

Woodress, James. Willa Cather: A Literary Life. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1987.