Cloaked in mystery, the conductor Anton Seidl materialized in the New World as Richard Wagner’s personal emissary in 1885. His appeal to Gilded Age women, who identified with Wagner’s strong female protagonists, was magnetic. In Brooklyn, Laura Langford’s Seidl Society presented summertime Seidl concerts on Coney Island fourteen times weekly. At the American premiere of Tristan und Isolde, women stood on their chairs and “screamed their delight.” At Seidl’s funeral in 1898, they clasped elbows to force their way into the Metropolitan Opera House, a spectacle of chaos. Seidl’s Manhattan friends—including Antonín Dvořák, whose New World Symphony he premiered—were legion. And yet he remained a man apart, afflicted with secret sorrows.

“Joseph Horowitz’s knowledge of the great Wagnerian conductor Anton Seidl—one of the most charismatic figures of the Gilded Age—is second to none. He also possesses a remarkable capacity to weave factual information into a compelling fictional narrative. I learned a lot about Seidl, about the social milieu that he seduced, and about the thrilling musical life that he dominated.”

—Barry Millington, chief music critic for The London Evening Standard and editor of The Wagner Journal

Paperback, 2026

Blackwater Press, 300 pages

Condition: New