Moral Fire is Joseph Horowitz's ninth book, and like much of his writing it aims to show music as central rather than peripheral to an understanding of American history. Centered on northeastern cities in the late nineteenth century, the study argues that “classical” or art music heard in concert settings excited, inspired, and offered deep emotional rewards to a broad audience. As the title suggests, Horowitz also wants to take seriously the notion of art as a moral force. This theme is explored in his Classical Music in America and other studies; indeed, Moral Fire has something of a retrospective character.Footnote ¹ On the other hand, the essence of the author's purpose (and some helpful summarizing of previous work) is contained in this relatively short book.

Horowitz has chosen for detailed portraits four musical activists whose cumulative lifetimes reach from the 1830s to the mid-twentieth century. He calls the contributions of all four “momentous” (xii) and his portraits “studies in heroic application” (5). Henry Lee Higginson (1834–1919) founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra (1881), single-handedly underwriting and managing it until 1918. The long career of Henry Edward Krehbiel (1854–1923) as a music critic, scholar, and lecturer ranged from the New York Tribune to studies of African American and Native American music. In 1889, Laura Holloway Langford (1843–1930) founded the woman-only Seidl Society, whose hundreds of members oversaw cheap summer concert series at Coney Island's Brighton Beach. Featuring the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra in programs centered on the music of Richard Wagner, the series were held annually until conductor Anton Seidl's death in 1898. The career of Charles Ives (1874–1954) in insurance combined with composition in a style that perplexed many listeners inspired passionate advocates during his life and continues to motivate important and insightful scholarship.

Horowitz's enthusiasm for his subjects mirrors their own musical dedication and initiative. Like them, he works to generate enthusiasm, using a style whose emotional underpinning encourages understanding and acceptance of late nineteenth-century musical devotion in action. He believes neither in the inherent elitism of art nor in an inherent social-class purpose of artistic activity or support. “If screaming Wagnerites standing on chairs [in New York in the 1890s] are in fact unthinkable today,” he asserts, “it is … because we mistrust high feeling” (6). Essential to his portraits is what he calls his subjects' “commitment to a democratic ethos” (226). “For Higginson and for Ives, the purpose of amassing money was to give it away” (227). Langford and the Seidl Society targeted working people for access to its fourteen weekly concerts. (Horowitz calls the society “classless” [227].) Krehbiel offered Native American and African American musical material to Czech composer Antonin Dvořák, who composed his ninth symphony, “From the New World,” while living in the United States.

Horowitz's knowledge of American and European arts, letters, politics, and music of the time is impressive, and he uses it amply to contextualize his four subjects and offer comparisons over time and space. For example, he presents Mark Twain's “craving” for uplift, “common touch projects” (228), and heterogeneous ideas and pursuits as distinctions shared with the musical four. A large number of other fin-de-siècle characters similarly enrich the book's texture. Essential to Horowitz's project, they pull together a critical mass of contemporaries who collectively undermine many of the stereotypes of the Gilded Age.

Horowitz's summary statements can be insightful and innovative. For example, having recounted the highlights of Gustav Mahler's New York conducting career, he uses the Viennese composer's music to encapsulate important transatlantic differences:

Here Horowitz invokes examples of continental European music incompatible with the American ethos. And indeed, all four subjects had influential Germanic connections: Higginson through his music study in Vienna; Krehbiel his German immigrant parents; Langford her relationship with Seidl; and Ives his father's German-born music teacher and his own Yale professor, German-trained Horatio Parker. Yet all four retained “wholesome” American habits of mind that estranged them from the twentieth century. (All four lived through World War I and Ives through World War II.) This particular summation helps explain why American classical music tastes have remained less open to twentieth-century styles than those of their European counterparts.

Some readers will want more critical distance from the quartet of subjects and a broader view of socioeconomic circumstances than Horowitz supplies. To be sure, he includes both positive and negative traits in all four and connects debates about “American” music with contemporaneous beliefs about evolution and race. Noting that the critic Krehbiel called African Americans inherently “musical,” he acknowledges the datedness of such an idea. But he also maintains that even suggesting that African American music could be an important source for an American “school” of composition undermined beliefs about racial hierarchy. And finally, he acknowledges the destruction of a belief in musical uplift as a result of World War I and the perversions of Nazism.

Nonetheless, the book's balance between praise of its subjects and critical distance toward them leans conspicuously toward the former. Horowitz's laudatory tone, seeming identification with his musical quartet, and use of terms such as “wholesome” and “Victorian” as straightforward descriptors marginalize important conflicts of the era. The “democratic ethos” of his subjects notwithstanding, brief mention of popular styles would allow him to assert with a broader frame of reference that musical taste and social position did not always go hand in glove. A few shorthand generalizations also undermine confidence in the analysis. By way of introducing Ives, Horowitz writes, “Connecticut Yankees are thrifty, pragmatic. They are businessmen, not artists” (186). He calls the Boston Symphony Orchestra “an embodiment of what was best about Boston” (50). On criticism of the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, he asks, “Was the White City a national brainwashing?” His answer is a resounding no: “To dismiss [positive] responses [to the fair] as naïve is to reduce men of sensibility and intellect to dupes” (4). Horowitz's position toward his material will not be universally welcome, but he plows ahead with conviction and rhetorical verve, offering a challenge to give his argument serious attention.

That challenge should be accepted in part because the book takes a step toward a broader goal: to further displace the term “Gilded Age” from its central position in American historical periodization. In his summary chapter, Horowitz acknowledges that the term is likely to remain in the popular imagination and that it has merit even without characterizing the era as a whole. But he also argues correctly that understanding classical music (or the arts in general) as vital in either a historical or contemporary context requires looking beyond elitism, oppression, social control, and “suffocating gentility” (232), characteristics he sees the term “gilded age” pushing to the fore. By contrast, Horowitz's advocates challenged them. He writes, “The earnestness of this period, its seriousness about life and its responsibilities, may … be read as a strength—the ‘moral fire’ of my title” (xiii).Footnote ² The activities of Higginson, Krehbiel, Langford, Ives, and their fellow travelers exemplify the possibility and acceptability of music as a life's central endeavor or even a reason for being.

Finally, rethinking music's integration into fin de siècle American life and culture is best served by experience of the music Horowitz discusses. His jargon-free introductions to specific pieces by Wagner, Dvořák, and Ives, among others, invite at the least a foray through YouTube. Horowitz has curated concerts, concert series, and music festivals for decades in “an attempt to infuse fortifying humanities content into the classical-music agenda” (xiv). One might call Moral Fire the converse: an attempt to infuse fortifying classical-music content into an understanding of American history. Horowitz does not ask today's listeners to embrace uplift in their own musical experience. Yet watching Leonard Bernstein conduct Ives's second symphony with the Bavarian Radio Orchestra undermines the notion that this music cannot be comprehensible, much less ingratiating, to nonspecialists. Horowitz's research and enthusiasm notwithstanding, it is grasping the music, as did its first listeners, which validates his point.