In " Understanding Toscanini : How He Became an American Culture-God and Helped Create a New Audience for Old Music ", he treats the Toscanini cult of the mid-twentieth century as a metaphor for the decline of classical music in the United States, arguing that the conductor Arturo Toscanini became the first non-composer to be widely regarded the world s greatest musician, and that no prior conductor of comparable eminence and influence had been so divorced from the music of his own time . " Wagner Nights " also proposes that American Wagnerism of the 1880s and 1890s was ( compared to European and Russian Wagner movements ) distinctly meliorist and proto-feminist, the vast majority of American Wagnerites having been women.
