Wagner Nights: An American History (California Studies in 19th Century Music) [Hardcover]

Joseph Horowitz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 5, 1994 | Series: California Studies in 19th Century Music (Book 9)

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

This delightful recounting of America's early reception of Richard Wagner's music deftly reviews foundations laid by others, then settles into Horowitz's real subject: the intense 12-year American career of Budapest-born conductor Anton Seidl and the all-female Seidl Society that supported his work. Horowitz argues that the Gilded Age had substance behind the glitter, that Wagner's music provided a veritable soundtrack for "protofeminist" experience in America, and that further investigation of American "high culture" at the turn of the last century will yield fascinating insights. As laid out here, American Wagnerism alone invites more studies into the history of its public reception. With his customary fresh approach to his subject and lively prose style, Horowitz (Understanding Toscanini, Univ. of Minnesota Pr., 1987) sets a high standard to be followed. Recommended for academic music and social history collections.
Bonnie Jo Dopp, formerly with Dist. of Columbia P.L.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

An expert blend of musical and social history, illuminating one of the cultural cores of America's ``Gilded Age.'' In the 1880s, as accurately depicted in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence, the upper echelons of New York society flocked to Faust (a scene carefully retained in Martin Scorsese's recent film version). But by the 1890s, Wagner fever had overtaken America's most ardent opera patrons, and not in New York alone. This is the world that Horowitz (The Ivory Trade, 1990, etc.) reveals in his fascinating, gracefully written study of American Wagnerism. Currently executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic, formerly a New York Times music critic, and a long-time student of the interplay between musical art and national culture, Horowitz orders his narrative around the parallel careers of the conductor Anton Seidl and the New York Tribune critic Henry Krehbiel. He evokes an era when issues of aesthetics and musical philosophy were the common currency of middle-class discussion. From the viewpoint of today's world, in which the column inches devoted to serious arts criticism in the daily papers have shrunk to virtually nothing, fin-de-siŠcle America was, musically and intellectually, an enviably lively place. Wagner's works dominated the stage, and his music and ``ideas'' were the subject of passionate debate. To this extent, Horowitz proves his thesis that the ``Gay '90s'' were not the crass, lowbrow scene its detractors have claimed. One fascinating recurrent theme in this study is the positive impact of Wagnerism on emerging feminism at the turn of the century. It appears that a majority of American Wagnerites were women, and the idea of Brunnhilde (as well as the regal dramatic sopranos who portrayed her) fit neatly with the notion of the ``New Woman'' then sweeping the nation. A work of engrossing scholarship about an important, unjustly ignored slice of our artistic past. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 404 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press (October 5, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520083946
• ISBN-13: 978-0520083943
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,072,569 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Wagner in America, August 1, 2001

By 

jerry i h (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wagner Nights: An American History (California Studies in 19th Century Music) (Paperback)

The music of Richard Wagner in the United States in the late nineteenth century is an unjustly neglected subject. This book strives to fill that void; it succeeds, up to a point.

Wagner reformed traditional opera and created the "music drama". The European reaction to this new concept was mixed. In America, however, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. The Metropolitan Opera came into existence on the strength of Wagner's music dramas. So warm was the reaction, that Wagner even considered (as did his son Siegfried) emigrating.

The lion's share of this book is devoted to Anton Seidl, who championed Wagner in New York in the 1890's. For many years, he worked at Wagner's side in Bayreuth, learning his craft. In the United States, he championed Wagner's music. The American public loved it. The title of this book, Wagner Nights, is a reference to the summer Wagner concerts that Seidl conducted on Coney Island at Brighton Beach.

In the latter portion of this book, the author switches from chronicler to analyst. Here, you must take him with a rather large grain of salt. He performs a pseudo-Freudian analysis on both the Wagner fans and Wagner's operas. He also tries his hand with a bit of cultural anthropology. Here, the information is subjective and marginal. These latter chapters could have been deleted without losing any important information.

In spite of these weaknesses, this book is interesting and enlightening. I recommend it, but with the previously stated reservations.