Before his death in 1898 at the age of 47, conductor Anton Seidl had given the US premieres of half of Wagner’s mature canon and the first performance of Dvořák’s New World Symphony. He was, as American composer, critic, lecturer and music publisher Arthur Farwell wrote, “famous alike for the depth of his silence and the height of his art”. Joseph Horowitz’s new novel The Disciple – in part a culmination of four decades’ scholarship – may justifiably inhabit the void of that silence while commemorating the height of that art.

Although his focus is on the musical world, Horowitz is as much a master literary conjurer of Gilded Age New York as Edith Wharton. His nonfiction books Wagner Nights (1994) and Moral Fire (2012) first awoke Seidl, the Tribune critic Henry Krehbiel and the Brooklyn impresario Laura Langford from their archival slumber. In this historical novel and prequel to his 2023 Mahler novel The Marriage, he sets them vividly in motion with all the license fictionalised embellishment can afford.

Langford, the clairvoyant theosophist running women-only Wagner concerts at Brighton Beach is possibly the most arrestingly drawn of...