August Göllerich once wrote that whenever faced with a puzzle concerning Franz Liszt, he always looked to Richard Wagner for the answer. And so it is with this brief overview of the reception of Liszt's music in the concert life of nineteenthcentury New York. Liszt's entire career was heavily interlaced with that of his contemporary, and, to a large extent, the reception of his music declined in almost direct proportion to the ascent of Wagner's in New York. Clearly, Liszt's music rose and then fell in the general public's taste while he was still alive and active, during and following the American Civil War—a situation that directly paralleled his performances on European programs—which was somewhat a result of Liszt’s own actions. After negative reviews in Germany greeted the premieres of a good number of the symphonic poems and other major orchestral works in the late 1850s and early 1860s, Liszt actively discouraged performances except when hard-pressed. He was not an opera composer, and his compositional attention had turned to semisacred works—music that was hardly suited to the contemporary concert venues of Berlin, Leipzig, and Vienna as well as those in the United States. Thus the European perception that Liszt's orchestral music was not widely accessible in the post-1860 period (the first print run of the symphonic poems was only one hundred copies) was also prevalent in America, and this resulted in the repetition of many more familiar works that then became—for want of a better word—hackneyed. At the same time, Wagner's operas were arriving on the concert stage, often as a result of Liszt's efforts, and then making their way to the opera houses—a kind of “double whammy” few other composers enjoyed.

I will not retrace Joseph Horowitz's admirable steps in chronicling the career of Anton Seidl (1850–1898) and his contribution to the course of Wagner’s music in New York in the so-called Gilded Age—that is, post–Civil War America up through World War I. And others in these pages will relate the stories of the Philharmonic Society and its conductors—Eisfeld, Bergmann, Leopold Damrosch and the dynasty that followed him, and Thomas and his orchestra.