The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Joseph Horowitz appraises a facsimile reprint of Anton Seidl’s essay on conducting

Review of Anton Seidl, On Conducting (Parrot Press, 2012). Facsimile of the first edition published in The Music Of the Modern World (D. Appleton, 1895).

July 2013, Volume 7, Number 2, 94–6.

Given his momentous personal and professional relationship to Richard Wagner, the conductor Anton Seidl (1850–98) has been remarkably little written about. As a member of the Bayreuth ‘Nibelung Chancellory’ for six years, Seidl was a crucial amanuensis whose responsibilities included serving as Hans Richter’s de facto understudy as conductor for the 1876 Bayreuth Ring. In 1879, Wagner persuaded Angelo Neumann to make Seidl (‘this young musician, in whom I have more confidence than in any other’) chief conductor of Neumann’s Neues Theater in Leipzig. In 1881–2, Seidl and Neumann toured the Ring throughout Europe. After 1885 Seidl was based in New York. He told Americans that Wagner had wished that he become his New World emissary. As principal conductor at the Metropolitan Opera (1885–91), he conducted the vast majority of performances during seasons when every opera was given in German, and most performances were of Wagner.