The Eyes Have It: Niall Hoskin welcomes a study of a great Wagnerian conductor

Review of Roger Allen, Arthur Nikisch: Connecting Cultures in a Fragmenting World (The Boydell Press, 2025). 

March 2026, Volume 20, Number 1, 94–6.

When Arthur Nikisch died in 1922, he was chief conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra; he had also presided over the early years of the London and Boston Symphony Orchestras and undertaken extensive and exhausting tours as one of the first ‘virtuoso conductors’. He was fêted as a Svengali of the podium and was a celebrity depicted in numerous studio portraits. Yet the only substantial written accounts of his career, by Heinrich Chevalley and Ferdinand Pfohl, appeared in German in 1922.