JOSEPH HOROWITZ: ANTON SEIDL, WAGNER, AND THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION Wagner Society of New York, October 15, 2026 Speaker: Joseph Horowitz, cultural historian and novelist Principal book discussed: The Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age (2026) I attended my first remote lecture with the Wagner Society of New York this week. They brought the novelist, music critic and cultural historian Joseph Horowitz in to discuss his novel, The Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale of the

After viewing Diana Damrau as the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte in London, I decided to make that my next venture. I queued up the Dec 30, 2006 Met production, and made an accidental discovery. It's in English! This is the Julie Taymor production of The Magic Flute, heavily abridged, and filled with gorgeous visuals, puppetry, fantastical creatures, dancers, flying figures, enormous masks, vivid costumes, and sets that seem to rearrange themselves like a kale

I wrote this short piece on the MOOC for my Wagner class. I wanted to make a recommendation among our readings, which I have found to be both dense and deliciously written, and informative. Understanding that all of us are busy adults, and sometimes forced to skim what we might savor if we had more time, I found chapter 4 of Collin Cleary’s Wagner’s Ring and the Germanic Tradition to be the beating heart of that book. Everything before leads up to it, and everything after fee

Wagner wanted myth to transform modern culture. Within a generation, modern consumer culture returned the favor. It put Wagner on trading cards and used him to sell concentrated beef extract. It’s a thick, concentrated meaty pasty glop you could dissolve in hot water to make broth. Think beef bouillon. That’s close enough. Meet Liebig Company’s Fleisch-Extract, or Liebig’s Extract of Meat. It was manufactured in Fray Bentos in Uruguay. The picture is not a poster, but a Liebi

At the end of Wagner's Die Walküre, Wotan punishes his favorite daughter for disobeying him. Brünnhilde disobeyed because she showed compassion, and although he is furious, he also knows that she acted on the deepest part of what he himself wanted. Wotan's punishment is terrible. He takes away her immortality, puts her into a supernatural sleep on a mountaintop, and leaves her there to be claimed by the first man who finds and awakens her. But Brünnhilde begs him for one last

I am about halfway through Die Walküre. This was a very busy week, and I am only now coming up for air. For me, the two most powerful scenes so far in the Ring cycle are when Wotan takes the ring from Alberich in Scene 4 of Das Rheingold, and the argument between Wotan and Fricka in Act II, Scene 1 of Die Walküre. I should note a discovery I made while writing that sentence is that Das Rheingold is not divided into acts. I hadn't noticed that before. Wagner wrote it as a cont