A Wagner Matinee

One of the most pervasive motifs in "A Wagner Matinée" is sleep, which—at a basic level—functions as a metaphor for the life Georgiana has led for the past three decades. Cut off from the world of art, Georgiana has focused largely on the concrete and mundane work needed to keep a household running: cooking, washing, stitching, caring for children, etc. Although these tasks have not—as Clark initially suspects—entirely destroyed her ability to experience music in intense and even spiritual ways, they have lulled her into a state of outward indifference; when she first arrives in Boston, "the place longed for hungrily half a lifetime," Clark describes her as "semi-somnambulant."Hearing orchestral music again after such a protracted silence is therefore like "waking" after a long sleep.

By the time the concert ends, however, sleep has also come to function as a metaphor for death: Clark imagines that Georgiana, listening to Siegfried's funeral march, has been "carried out […] into some world of death vaster yet, where […] hope has lain down with hope and dream with dream and, renouncing, slept." Although this association between sleep and death is certainly not unique to this story, Cather uses it in a way that ties several of her themes together: Georgiana's long artistic "sleep" is inseparable from her lost youth and all the hopes and dreams that characterized it. This in turn is why Georgiana's awakening is so painful; it reminds her that all she has to look forward to on her return to Nebraska is more death—spiritual and, finally, physical.

Water appears throughout "A Wagner Matinée," most commonly in connection to music: Clark, for example, describes the concert as a "deluge," and the violin bows in particular as "[driving] obliquely downward, like the pelting streaks of rain in a summer shower." The performance elicits a similar response from Georgiana, whose crying Clark compares to "a shallow vessel [that] overflows in a rain-storm." Although these comparisons both evoke everyday usages of water imagery—we talk, for instance, about music "flowing" or emotions "welling up"—Cather also associates water and music in order to make a point about the "life-giving" properties of the latter. This becomes clear in a passage where Clark likens the soul to "that strange moss which can lie on a dusty shelf half a century and yet, if placed in water, grows green again."