Anton Seidl: A Fictional Tale

The Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age, is a prequel to Joseph Horowitz’s previous novel The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York (2024). Cloaked in mystery, 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 concert on Coney Island (as many as 14 times a week). Seidl’s Manhattan friends – including Antonin Dvorak, whose Symphony no. 9 in E minor, “Fromm the New World,” he conducted at its premiere – were legion. And yet he remained a man apart, afflicted with secret sorrows. In Horowitz’s novel, the main characters are Seidl, Langford, and the critic Henry Krehbiel. 

About the author: Joseph Horowitz has long been a leading authority on the Wagnerism movement in the US. His Wagner Nights: An American History (1994), named best book of the year by the Society for American Music, rescued Anton Seidl from obscurity. Prior to Horowitz’s extensive archival research, next to nothing was remembered about Seidl’s historic Metropolitan Opera seasons or his summertime Wagner Nights at Coney Island. In all, Horowitz is the author of fourteen books dealing with the history of American classical music. He regularly produces NPR “More than Music” documentaries. He has served as Executive Director for the Brooklyn Philharmonic (in the 1990s) and PostClassical Ensemble in Washington, D.C. (which presented the first performance in more than a century of Seidl’s chidrens’ chorus “Good Night.”) As artistic consultant to the New Jersey Symphony, he presented the premiere performance of Seidl’s synthesis of Siegfried act two.

The event will be followed by a social hour with refreshments.