Wagner, the Gilded Age, and the Historical Imagination

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 Gilded Age.

I wasn't familiar with Horowitz, or his work, but my recent class on Wagner prepared me to hear his lecture.

Horowitz discussed his decades-long investigation of Anton Seidl (1850–1898), Richard Wagner's protégé and one of the most influential conductors in nineteenth-century America. Horowitz's latest novel, The Disciple, brings Seidl and the musical culture of Gilded Age New York to life.

"Whatever you know about the Gilded Age is wrong," said Horowitz. "If you're thinking about the television series, or Edith Wharton's description in The Age of Innocence, it's not just a bunch of rich snobs and robber barons. This is a period in which Americans were engaged with the arts far more intensely than today."

He brought a strong argument to the table. His examples revealed an American cultural life almost unrecognizable today.

In the summer of 1894, Seidl conducted a professional orchestra at Brighton Beach twice daily, seven days a week. The concerts cost just twenty-five cents, and the repertoire included Wagner's Parsifal, Siegfried, Lohengrin, and The Flying Dutchman, alongside Beethoven, Liszt, and other composers. Laura Langford, a pioneering female journalist, organized the Seidl Society to sustain the concerts. Horowitz observed that she eventually presented more concerts in Brooklyn than the New York Philharmonic did in Manhattan.

Horowitz recounted an extraordinary response to the American premiere of Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde in 1886. After the curtain fell, the audience remained silent for several minutes. Then women reportedly stood on their chairs and screamed. During the third act, some women fainted when Tristan removed the bandage from his wound. Horowitz attributed this unusually intense emotional investment in the drama, particularly among women whose opportunities for independent lives were restricted.

When Seidl died in 1898, Horowitz reported that women outnumbered men twenty to one among those gathered downstairs at his funeral at the Metropolitan Opera House. Determined to attend despite inadequate space, women linked arms and forced their way forward. A policeman was reportedly knocked from his horse in the resulting surge. The episode suggests an extraordinary level of personal attachment to a conductor and the musical culture he represented.

Horowitz emphasized that the Seidl Society represented an ambitious experiment in cultural democracy. He read from a remarkable handwritten speech by Seidl, discovered in the archives, in which the conductor argued that working people deserved access to serious music.

The other major character in The Disciple is Henry Edward Krehbiel, an influential music critic and friend of Seidl. Horowitz considers Krehbiel one of the most remarkable musical journalists America has ever produced. I'll talk about him more below. Krehbiel participated actively in New York's musical culture, wrote extensively about music, and promoted the development of an American musical identity.

Horowitz discussed many other figures in American musical history.

Among them was Angelo Neumann, the Austrian-Jewish impresario who organized an ambitious touring company devoted to Wagner's operas, bringing the Ring cycle across Europe and into Russia. Antonín Dvořák, the Czech composer, was Seidl's close friend and a familiar presence at Fleischmann's Café, where Dvořák drank beer while Seidl smoked cigars. Dvořák's admiration for Victor Herbert's Second Cello Concerto, performed under Seidl, helped inspire his own celebrated concerto. Horowitz also discussed Gustav Mahler, whose New York career Krehbiel regarded as a disappointment, not because Mahler lacked musical genius, but because he failed to assume Seidl's role as a champion of American musical culture. Together, these personalities suggest a New York musical world far richer, more interconnected, and more animated by artistic ambition than conventional portrayals of the Gilded Age might lead us to expect.

His novel represent the culmination of more than thirty years of engagement with this forgotten world.

The Continuum between Creative Non-Fiction and Historical Fiction

For me, it was his insights as a writer handling these materials that fascinated and kept my attention, even more than his encyclopedic knowledge.

Horowitz discussed the boundary between historical fiction and creative nonfiction. This was one of his most provocative arguments of the evening, in my opinion.

I'd like to quote him in full:

"I feel that historical fiction is actually an indispensable tool for the cultural historian that you learn things when you when you quote fictionalize these stories that you've not otherwise discovered. I also believe that there is a continuum between cultural history and historical fiction and there's no break. In Wagner Nights, I have a chapter that begins with Laura Langford addressing the audience in the music pavilion which seated 3,000 people and was over the water and I put myself in her place and described what she was thinking and a few people said to me you can't do right? That that's fiction. I said no, because there's no such thing as fact. You're always going to have to contextualize and interpret whatever facts you discover. So, I don't even think it's accurate to call my novels historical fiction. I think of them as creative non-fiction, but they're part of a continuum."

It's worth pointing out that his book, Wagner Nights: An American History (1994) is published and marketed as nonfiction, specifically cultural and music history. It is not a novel. The University of California Press published it in its California Studies in 19th-Century Music series. Kirkus Reviews explicitly classifies it as nonfiction, and it was reviewed as a scholarly history in The American Historical Review. He acknowledged that Wagner Nights includes passages in which he imaginatively reconstructed historical figures' thoughts, including Laura Langford's inner experience while addressing a Coney Island audience.

So Horowitz believes there is a continuum between cultural history and historical fiction, rather than an absolute division. What's particularly interesting, to me, is that his position emerged from decades of careful, thorough historical research, and not from a novelist's desire to escape the constraints of historical accuracy. During the 1990s, he explored two largely untouched archival collections: Seidl's personal papers at Columbia University and the Seidl Society's records at the Brooklyn Historical Society. These included original letters, musical scores, scrapbooks, handwritten speeches, and newspaper clippings.

He argued that his novels grew out of his scholarship, rather than replacing it. He also demonstrated that historical fiction can be constructed around people neglected by conventional accounts of history, particularly figures such as Laura Langford whose achievements were partly obscured by the social and institutional arrangements of their time.

Why Horowitz Could Not Have Written His Novel Using Only Screens

Horowitz credits the physical experience of archival research with making The Disciple possible. When he began researching Seidl in the 1990s, he worked primarily with two collections: Seidl's papers at Columbia University and the Seidl Society's scrapbooks and records at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Neither archive had been fully cataloged or digitized. Horowitz described reaching into boxes without knowing what he would discover.

There were original letters, scores, handwritten documents, newspaper clippings, and scrapbooks, often in no immediately comprehensible order.

He now regards this as a benefit.

"If I had been using screens and digitized archives, I could never have written this novel," said Horowitz. "It was only because I was able to handle this material, the letters and the papers, that I acquired an almost eerie feeling of intimacy with Anton. And that's how I was able to write a novel about him."

This is especially significant because Seidl was a notoriously reserved figure whose public accomplishments are much better documented than his private thoughts. Horowitz did not simply accumulate facts about Seidl. He said he developed a feeling for Seidl's habits, relationships, emotional burdens, and personality through prolonged engagement with objects that Seidl and his contemporaries had actually handled. He emphasized that this experience permitted him to imagine Seidl's voice convincingly.

For Horowitz, original letters are not merely sources of historical information. They can create a sense of personal encounter across time. That feeling of intimacy is central to his explanation of why he could eventually transform historical scholarship into fiction.

In my opinion, one of the most significant implications of Horowitz's lecture is that extensive historical research can become the foundation for imaginative literature without ceasing to serve historical understanding.

The Most Remarkable Musical Journalist in American History

The journalist was Henry Edward Krehbiel (1854–1923). Krehbiel was a prominent New York music critic, author, educator, and participant in the city's musical life. He wrote program notes for the New York Philharmonic and was closely associated with Anton Seidl.

Horowitz emphasized the extraordinary breadth of his work, including criticism, music history, opera, musical education, and African-American folk music.

Among his books, Krehbiel wrote Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music (1914). The book examines African-American musical traditions, including spirituals, the songs of enslaved Americans, musical forms, rhythms, and the music of Black Creole communities. It was not the first book to address this musical tradition, as Krehbield acknowledges in his preface. Krehbiel's contribution was somewhat different. Rather than primarily collecting songs, he attempted a systematic musical analysis of African American folk traditions, examining their scales, rhythms, religious characteristics, African influences, and contributions to American national music. I've included a link to a digital copy of that book below.

Horowitz also mentioned that his own book Moral Fire contains an extended essay on Krehbiel, approximately sixty or seventy pages in length. He considers it one of the fullest examinations of Krehbiel available.

He lamented the absence of a surviving comprehensive Krehbiel archive and suggested that Krehbiel deserves a full biography.

Other books Krehbiel wrote included Studies in the Wagnerian Drama (1891), Chapters of Opera (1908), A Book of Operas: Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music (1919). Many can be downloaded from Project Gutenberg, and I've included that link below, also.

The Most Vivid Portrait of Wagner Ever Published

That book, according to Horowitz, was Personal Recollections of Wagner (1908). The original German title was Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner (1907). The author was Angelo Neumann (1838–1910), the Austrian theatrical impresario closely associated with Richard Wagner and the international promotion of his operas. Horowitz drew on Neumann's memoirs when reconstructing the period surrounding Wagner's death in Venice in February 1883. He recounted how Neumann and Seidl received news of Wagner's death and subsequently opened a letter Wagner had written shortly before dying. Horowitz used these details in The Disciple, combining documented events and correspondence with imagined personal recollection.

Horowitz believes Neumann offers one of the most vivid accounts of Wagner as a man.

It's hard to believe Horowitz covered all of this material in less than an hour, but he did. I've left out several sections I could have included, because I wanted to focus on the subjects that interested me the most. I wish I could have asked questions about how the historical imagination can produce understanding through an unusually intimate engagement with surviving evidence. He only touched on this subject briefly. For Horowitz, archival research eventually became something more than the accumulation of documents. It enabled him to imagine the personal lives of people who had previously existed for him chiefly as names in the historical record. An intriguing question is at what point does a writer's intimate familiarity with historical evidence permit imaginative reconstruction, and how should the resulting narrative communicate the limits of what can actually be known?

That's a question for another day, but Horowitz has certainly set me thinking about it.

References:

Horowitz, Joseph. “Joseph Horowitz on The Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age.” YouTube, uploaded by Wagner Society of New York, 15 Oct. 2026, https://www.youtube.com/live/QXyhqtLg6q8.

Horowitz, Joseph. The Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age. Blackwater Press, 2026. https://www.blackwaterpress.com/product/the-disciple/.

Horowitz, Joseph. The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York. Blackwater Press, 2023. https://www.blackwaterpress.com/product/the-marriage/.

Horowitz, Joseph. Moral Fire: Musical Portraits from America's Fin de Siècle. University of California Press, 2012. https://www.ucpress.edu/books/moral-fire/hardcover.

Horowitz, Joseph. Wagner Nights: An American History. University of California Press, 1994. University of California Press, https://www.ucpress.edu/books/wagner-nights/hardcover.

Krehbiel, Henry Edward. Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music. G. Schirmer, 1914. Smithsonian Libraries and Archives, https://library.si.edu/digital-library/book/afroamericanfol00kreh.

Krehbiel, Henry Edward. “Books by Krehbiel, Henry Edward.” Project Gutenberg, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/1296.

Metropolitan Opera Archives. “Tristan und Isolde: December 1, 1886.” Metropolitan Opera Archives, https://archives.metopera.org/MetOperaSearch/record.jsp?dockey=0357764.

Neumann, Angelo. Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner. 3rd ed., L. Staackmann, 1907. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/erinnerungenanr00neumgoog.

Neumann, Angelo. Erinnerungen an Richard Wagner. 3rd ed., L. Staackmann, 1907. Open Library, https://openlibrary.org/books/OL14790444M/Erinnerungen_an_Richard_Wagner.

Neumann, Angelo. Personal Recollections of Wagner. Henry Holt, 1908. Google Books, https://books.google.com/books?id=AkIQAAAAYAAJ.

Neumann, Angelo. Personal Recollections of Wagner. Henry Holt, 1908. Google Play Books, https://play.google.com/store/books/details/Angelo_Neumann_Personal_Recollections_of_Wagner?id=AkIQAAAAYAAJ.

Note: The YouTube link for Horowitz's lecture for the Wagner Society of New York will likely expire at some point.