An allusion is a reference to another work of literature or art. Allusions are typically passing comments rather than detailed explorations, but they can nevertheless convey important information about a writer's intentions for his or her own work.

As a story in large part about music, "A Wagner Matinée" contains multiple allusions to various compositions, ranging from piano solos to full-length operas. The reference to Schumann's "Joyous Farmer," for instance, serves as ironic commentary: Clark mentions practicing it as a boy working on his uncle's land, where the physical laborinvolved in farming made it anything but happy.Perhaps the most significant allusion in Cather's story, however, is to a work of literature: John Keats's sonnet, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer." This poem, which dates from the Romantic Era, celebrates the power of art to transport its audience to new worlds; the speaker compares the experience of reading Chapman's translation of Homer to the feelings Cortez must have had on first seeing the Pacific, when "all his men / Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—/ Silent, upon a peak in Darien." When Clark describes Georgiana as "[sitting] silent upon her peak in Darien," he is therefore alluding to the rapturous feelings the concert has woken in her, though in Georgiana's case, the (re)discovery of this transported state is bittersweet.