Wagner Nights

As never before or since, Richard Wagner's name dominated American music-making at the close of the nineteenth century. Europe, too, was obsessed with Wagner, but—as Joseph Horowitz shows in this first history of Wagnerism in the United States—the American obsession was unique.

The central figure in Wagner Nights is conductor Anton Seidl (1850-1898), a priestly and enigmatic personage in New York musical life. Seidl's own admirers included the women of the Brooklyn-based Seidl Society, who wore the letter "S" on their dresses. In the summers, Seidl conducted fourteen times a week at Brighton Beach, filling the three-thousand-seat music pavilion to capacity. The fact that most Wagnerites were women was a distinguishing feature of American Wagnerism and constituted a vital aspect of the fin-de-siècle ferment that anticipated the New American Woman.

Drawing on the work of such cultural historians as T. Jackson Lears and Lawrence Levine, Horowitz's lively history reveals an "Americanized" Wagner never documented before. An entertaining and startling read, a treasury of operatic lore, Wagner Nights offers an unprecedented revisionist history of American culture a century ago.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Joseph Horowitz is Executive Director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, the resident orchestra of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. From 1981 to 1994 he was program editor for the Kaufmann Concert Hall of the 92nd Street Y, where he also served as artistic advisor for the annual Schubertiade. He was music critic of the New York Times from 1976 to 1980. His three previous books are Conversations with Arrau, winner of an ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award; Understanding Toscanini: A Social History of American Concert Life, named one of the most distinguished books of 1987 by the National Book Critics Circle and now available from California in paperback; and The Ivory Trade: Piano Competitions and the Business of Music.