Reviews:

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“For several decades, Joseph Horowitz has been our foremost chronicler of the vexed fate of American classical music, in particular of the wondrous story of Wagner-mania in Gilded Age Brooklyn and New York. Saturated with the heady potions extracted from years of archival work, he has at last given in to what, long ago, he was enticed to attempt in reaction to his discoveries. And that is to turn to the increasingly popular genre of historical fiction that molds together scholarship and fantasy. This has enabled the author to bring to life the protagonists on the musical scene of the 1880s and 1890s with all their missionary zeal and human foibles, providing, along the way, local color, historical nuance, irony, and ultimately pathos.

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“Horowitz chooses to focus on three very different personalities, related to each other through their love of Wagner. At the center of it all we find Anton Seidl, the charismatic and enigmatic conductor whose death, in 1898, at the early age of forty-eight, and whose elaborate memorial service provide a fittingly somber conclusion to Horowitz’s tale. . . .

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“Seidl found an unlikely partner in Laura Langford, the energetic founder of the Seidl Society, which was reserved for women only. She came to preside over this unlikely intersection of Wagnerism and feminism, a constellation unique in all cultural history. . . .

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“And then there is Henry Krehbiel, the idealistic and longtime music critic of the New York Tribune.  Of Krehbiel [Horowitz] observes that he could “neither think nor act without engaging in instruction.” . . .

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“Beyond conveying the interactions of Seidl, Langford, and Krehbiel, Horowitz’s canvas teems with topics and incidents of considerable cultural interest. . . . The Disciple is perhaps best viewed as a love letter to Gilded Age New York and its vibrant music scene. As such, it serves as a prequel to Horowitz’s earlier novel The Marriage, which revisits Gustav and Alma Mahler’s final sojourn in New York in 1910- 1911. To anyone interested in the history of music in New York, The Disciple and The Marriage are must-reads.”

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—Hans Rudolf Vaget, Wagner Notes (the journal of the Wagner Society of New York)

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Horowitz sees Seidl’s sudden death at the age of 47 as a national and cultural calamity. “Bigger than the Toscanini story to come, bigger than the Bernstein story,” he writes, “Seidl’s New World sojourn is, finally, intensified by the pathos of unconsummated promise. Its magnitude and implications challenge understanding.” . . .

 

A scrupulous researcher and, most importantly, a gifted storyteller, Horowitz’ s lively prose, ready wit, and persuasive dialogue blow the dust of history off of his deftly assembled characters. And what a cast list it is. There’s the tireless Laura Langford, proto-feminist, social progressive, clairvoyant and ardent theosophist, who, as founder of the Seidl Society, became the leading impresario in Brooklyn . . . Then there’s the dean of New York music critics Henry Krehbiel, a heavy-set intellectual wending his solitary way to his desk at the New York Tribune every evening to craft his ponderous pronouncements . . . Antonin Dvorak is another fine vignette. . .

 

The legendary European singers that Seidl brought to America are captured in all their gossipy self-absorption and . . . There’s a refreshingly even-handed treatment of Cosima Wagner, the black widow of Bayreuth. . . . Horowitz’s Richard Wagner, narcissistic, twinkly eyed, and fiendish by turns, is one of the more persuasive character sketches I’ve come across. . . .

 

Above all, The Disciple conjures the sense of an America rich with potential, a nation crackling with energy, its buildings, transportation, and industry exploding with unbridled ambition. From Chicago to Manhattan, the author seems familiar with every borough and street . . .

 

And yet there’s an inscrutable sadness about his central protagonist, an unfathomable melancholy .   . . There's a personal tragedy at play, one that Horowitz teases out over the course of the novel, keeping us in suspense until Seidl’s ‘Rosebud’ moment.

 

— Clive Paget, Musical America