The Disciple

Cloaked in mystery, Anton Seidl materialized in the New World as Wagner' s personal emissary. A sorcerer, he commanded musical New York and toured widely, everywhere received with awed deference. In Brooklyn, Laura Langford' s Seidl Society presented summertime Seidl concerts on Coney Island fourteen times weekly. Working women arrived in special railroad cars; Black orphans were regaled with roast chicken, ice cream, and the Tannhä user March. A clairvoyant theosophist, Langford identified Seidl as a " chela" and traced the ceremonies of Parsifal to the Himalayas. Seidl' s appeal was uncanny; at the American premiere of Tristan und Isolde, women stood on their chairs and " screamed their delight." At his funeral, women clasped elbows to force their way into the mobbed Metropolitan Opera House, a spectacle of chaos. His Manhattan friends— including Antonin Dvorá k, whose New World Symphony he premiered— were legion. And yet Seidl remained a man apart, afflicted with secret sorrows.