"As never before or since, the life and works of Richard Wagner 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." "Wagner himself predicted that the New World would prove especially receptive to his operas and ideas, and he was right. The conductor Anton Seidl (1850-1898) was his crucial New World emissary, a priestly and enigmatic central figure in New York's musical life - and the central figure in Wagner Nights. Though acclaimed in Europe as Wagner's closest protege, Seidl became an American citizen. Seidl's own admirers included the women of the Brooklyn-based Seidl Society, who wore the letter "S" on their dresses. For wives whose husbands were away making money, and whose own professional possibilities were suppressed by contemporary mores, Seidl's performances offered the intense emotional release of Sieglinde's ecstatic pregnancy and Isolde's orgasmic love-death. At the Metropolitan Opera, according to the Musical Courier, the audience "stood on their chairs and screamed their delight for what seemed hours." In the summers, Seidl conducted fourteen times a week at Brighton Beach, on Coney Island. On "Wagner Nights," sponsored by the Seidl Society, the three-thousand-seat music pavilion was filled to capacity." "That most Wagnerites were women was a distinguishing feature of American Wagnerism. Indeed, America's Wagner cult constituted a vital aspect of fin-de-siecle ferment, anticipating the New American Woman." "Drawing on the work of such cultural historians as T. Jackson Lears and Lawrence Levine, Joseph Horowitz's passionately argued history reveals an "Americanized" Wagner never before documented. As understood in America, Wagner did not challenge the reigning "genteel tradition" but - remarkably enough, given his blatantly sexual and irreligious themes - actually buttressed it. Conventional readings of a dull, repressive Gilded Age make no allowance for the erotic passions and intellectual resourcefulness of the Wagner cult." "For general readers and music lovers, Wagner Nights will be a startling and entertaining read, a treasury of operatic lore from the early heyday of the Metropolitan Opera. For scholars, it offers an unprecedented revisionist history of American culture a century ago."--BOOK JACKET.