Wagner Nights / Joseph Horowitz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Horowitz, Joseph, Author.

Series:

California Studies in 19th-Century Music Series

California Studies in 19th-Century Music ; 9

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (416 p.)

Edition:

Reprint 2020

Place of Publication:

Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, [2020]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Frontmatter

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Wagnerism and America

Prelude: A Gilded Age Funeral

1. The Ascendancy

2. The First Missionaries

3. The Master Builder

4. Germanized Opera

5. The Coming of the Disciple

6. Tristan und Isolde

7. Der grosse Schweiger

8. Der Ring des Nibelungen

9. Partial Eclipse

10. The Parsifal Entertainment

11. Wagner Nights

12. Protofeminism

13. Trauermusik

14. Parsifal Revisited

15. Enter Modernism

16. Secularization

Postlude: The Gilded Age Reobserved

Appendix: The Wagner Operas: Synopses and Premieres

Notes

Index

Notes:

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 28. Sep 2020)

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780520323049

0520323041

OCLC:

1198931867