The Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age
Hungarian conductor Anton Seidl is leading the New York Metropolitan Opera and introducing American audiences to the works of Richard Wagner in the late 1800s. Despite his many successes in New York, Seidl is little known today. As author Horowitz notes: he “died too young to leave recordings and … was singularly forgotten even by the institutions – the Met and the New York Philharmonic—he once led.”
With The Disciple, Horowitz aims to rectify that. After setting the stage with an 1878 prologue in Bayreuth, he offers a fictional look at Seidl’s life between 1886 and 1898, tapping into a rich array of materials—a retrospective on Seidl’s life written by friends, archival material including concert program books, letters, a speech in halting English—to remember the man and his work.
This work of biographical fiction is authoritative, cramming fascinating information about the notables of the day, concert venues, performers, music critics, and newly initiated Wagnerites into dense paragraphs, adding snippets of factual recollections of time and place and observations about classical music’s place in American life. The fictional tale does not follow a straightforward path, takes its time to zero in on Seidl, and focuses more on what Seidl sees than how he feels. The result, for this reader, is a comprehensive but distant impression of the man.
Reviewers from inside the musical world—music critics, academics, and music directors—have characterized the work as magical, enriching, enlightening. Perhaps as only an occasional opera goer, this reader is too distracted by individual notes to appreciate the overall score and thus feels that the fiction does not rise above the facts, so the story does not sing.
