Joe Horowitz

Reviewing my new novel “The Disciple: A Wagnerian Tale of the Gilded Age,” the British critic Clive Paget writes in “Musical America” that it’s “a richly detailed depiction of [New York] at the apogee of the Gilded Age and its embrace of all things Wagnerian.” His review reads in part:

In Verdi, the elephants are in Aida. In Wagner, the elephant in the room is a pamphlet: “Judaism and Music.” It seems the Rosetta Stone of Wagner scholarship, the central text that lays bare what lurks hidden in his life and work. Beyond a doubt, it is an egregious text,

I am in Ann Arbor, participating in a Mahler project with Ken Kiesler and his fervent University of Michigan Symphony Orchestra – the group with which I memorably toured South Africa a year ago (and about which I blogged and broadcast). Addressing a class of young conductors this morning, I

Leonard Bernstein celebrated Dmitri Shostakovich’s sixtieth birthday by proclaiming him “an authentic genius” – “and there aren’t too many of those around anymore.” That took courage in 1966, when Shostakovich – the leading Soviet musician — remained a Cold War cartoon of the stooge and simpleton. As Bernstein appreciated earlier

From 2010 until its sudden termination by DOGE last April, I directed Music Unwound, an NEH-funded national consortium of orchestras and universities.  A letter from Michael McDonald, the acting NEH chairman, informed me that the demise of Music Unwound represented “an urgent priority for the administration.” It was ended “to safeguard