Wagner Nights
eBook - ePub

Wagner Nights

An American History

  1. 414 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Wagner Nights

An American History

About this book

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.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

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Yes, you can access Wagner Nights by Joseph Horowitz in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas & Biografías musicales. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. CONTENTS
  5. ILLUSTRATIONS
  6. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
  7. INTRODUCTION WAGNERISM AND AMERICA
  8. Prelude A Gilded Age Funeral
  9. 1 The Ascendancy
  10. 2 The First Missionaries
  11. 3 The Master Builder
  12. 4 Germanized Opera
  13. 5 The Coming of the Disciple
  14. 6 Tristan und Isolde
  15. 7 Der grosse Schweiger
  16. 8 Der Ring des Nibelungen
  17. 9 Partial Eclipse
  18. 10 The Parsifal Entertainment
  19. 11 Wagner Nights
  20. 12 Protofeminism
  21. 13 Trauermusik
  22. 14 Parsifal Revisited
  23. 15 Enter Modernism
  24. 16 Secularization
  25. POSTLUDE The Gilded Age Reobserved
  26. APPENDIX THE WAGNER OPERAS: SYNOPSES AND PREMIERES
  27. NOTES
  28. INDEX