Yearning for the New Age: Laura Holloway-Langford and Late Victorian Spirituality

9. Music of the Spheres

front/backmatter 181 In May 1889, Laura Holloway-Langford created the Seidl Society. Taking its name from the conductor Anton Seidl, the Society was established to promote musical culture among “all classes of women and children” and to produce “harmony over individual life and character.”1 Convinced that music was a spiritual force with the power to dispel the divisions created by sex, race, or social class, Laura Holloway-Langford envisioned the Seidl Society as a public space where she could implement her ideals. The Society opened the world of classical music, particularly the “new music” composed by Richard Wagner, to people who ordinarily had little opportunity to hear it. Through educational programs sponsored for its members, the Seidl Society was also a vehicle for the spread of esoteric religious ideas. From its inception, the Society was avowedly feminist in its aims, and it showcased the ability of women to manage a complex nonprofit organization whose activities were far more demanding than those undertaken by ordinary women’s clubs. HOLLOWAY-LANGFORD’S MUSICAL LIFE Of all the arts, it was music that most inspired Laura Holloway-Langford. In her youth she had studied piano at the Nashville Female Academy, where one of her classmateswas Camilla Urso, a musical prodigy who was born in France in 1842. As a child, Urso had played the violin on tour in 9 Music of the Spheres S 181 182 front/backmatter 182 Yearning for the New Age Europe and the United States, but in 1856 she settled in Nashville, where her mother taught French and where she occasionally performed, accompanied by George Taylor, a piano instructor at the Academy who became her husband and father of her two children. By 1863, however, Urso had left Nashville (and apparently her husband as well) to resume her musical career as one of the first women to become a professional violinist. Laura Holloway-Langford would have heard Urso play in the 1880s and 1890s at the Metropolitan Opera House, Steinway Hall, or the Brooklyn Academy of Music. At home in Brooklyn, Holloway-Langford hosted musical evenings where she and her friends performed.Later she recalledthat her son George had been inordinately fond of orchestral music, but that the most musical member of her family was her sister Anne Catherine. In 1880, another sister, Ella Watson Carter, married William James Henderson, who gained prominence as a music critic, first for the New York Times, 1887–1902, and then for the New York Sun.2 Laura Holloway-Langford had long believed that music was the link between the material and the spiritual worlds, an idea familiar to spiritualists , who typically opened their circles with the sound of the flute, harp,orguitar.Holdinghands,membersofthecircleoftenjoinedinsong. Through music, they sought to come into harmony with each other and with the vibrations emanating from other realms. Thus, when she wrote Beyond the Sunrise, Holloway-Langford had music mark the presence of spirits. The character Cleo proclaimed in the book that the “music of the spheres” was not a myth, although she feared that most people had forgotten how to hear it. Cleo was certain that if people could be “keyed in harmony ” they would feel “the rhythm throbbing through the universe.”3 As a Theosophist, Holloway-Langford understood the universe to be layered across space and time, with levels of reality coordinated and held together by an ethereal substance.4 She believed that this substance was manifest in music which was “the most perfect symbol” for “expressing Theosophy or Divine Wisdom.”5 AftershereturnedtoBrooklynfromEuropeinfall1884,LauraHollowayLangfordwasaregularpatronoftheMetropolitanOperaHouse .Oftwentyone librettos in her personal library, twelve were for Wagnerian operas, most of which were performed at the Metropolitan between 1886 and 1891.6 There she heard the Hungarian conductor Anton Seidl, who had joined the Metropolitan Opera in 1885 and who was “looked upon as a front/backmatter 183 Music of the Spheres 183 repository of Wagnerian tradition—a prophet, priest, and paladin.”7 A newspaper article in 1888 remarked that at her home Holloway-Langford maintainedafineconservatorywhose“wallshaveechoedthedivinenotes of...[Adelina]Patti,[Etelka]Gerster,[ClaraLouise]Kellogg,and[Amalie] Materna, while the sweet violin strains of Ole Bull and [Rafael] Joseffy havecharmeditsmistressandherguests.”8 UndoubtedlyLauraHollowayLangford had heard these great stars perform at the Metropolitan Opera House or at the Academy of Music, not in her own conservatory. Inaccurate as the article may be, it nevertheless demonstrates that in the public mindHolloway-Langfordwasknowntobeapatronofmusiccultureeven before she founded the Seidl Society. IfinthewinterHolloway...