Six major composers of the 19th century were born between 1809 and 1813: Mendelssohn in 1809; Schumann and Chopin in 1810; Liszt in 1811; Verdi and Wagner in 1813. It would be ridiculous to suggest that any one of these was the most accomplished of the lot, but certainly the most spectacular, the most influential, the most infamous, and the most controversial of them was Richard Wagner. Despite being dead for more than a century, Wagner (1813-1883) and his legacy at Bayreuth have never really been out of the news. Frequently, this has been for the wrong reasons, the most recent of which is entertainingly postmodern. Some days ago, the British-Jewish pianist-conductor, Daniel Barenboim, was in Jerusalem with the Berlin Staatskapelle Orchestra. He had wanted to include Wagner in his programme but was reminded in advance of Israel's informal ban on music by the anti-Semitic Wagner. While speaking in Israel, however, he happened to be interrupted by a mobile phone ringing to a tune from Wagner's Die Walküre. Barenboim reckoned that if Israelis had no objection to hearing Wagner jingling on cellphones, they had no call to object hearing fuller Wagnerian melody during his concert. So, when encored at the Jerusalem International Convention Center, he announced he would play a bit from Tristan und Isolde. A few in the audience jeered, some left in disgust, the rest stayed on and enjoyed the encore. The next day, the cultural police were up in arms, and the event has been described as the 'cultural rape' of Israel. Barenboim has countered by saying that although some of Wagner's writings are anti-Jewish, there is nothing anti-Jewish about Wagner's music. Over the second half of the 19th century, after the operatic successes of Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser in the 1840s, Wagner was as musically dominant as Beethoven had been over the century's first half. He was at the same time an opportunist, careerist, profligate and philanderer, who was republican when it suited him - during the revolutions of 1848 he wrote propaganda for the radical press - and a monarchist the rest of the time. This was mostly because he considered himself the ultimate artistic monarch of all humanity and partly because, in 1864, Ludwig II of Bavaria became his devoted patron. In the entire history of Western music it is difficult to think of a musician whose character was as loathsome and personal life as despicable. One critic describes him as being 'heartless to a degree that would have made a Roman emperor shudder'. According to another: 'He was a short man, about 5'5' tall, but he radiated power, belief in himself, ruthlessness...As a human being he was frightening. Amoral, hedonistic, selfish, virulently racist, arrogant, filled with gospels of the Superman (the superman naturally being Wagner) and the superiority of the German race, he stands for all that is unpleasant in human character.' Along the same lines, but on a much grander and earlier scale than the politically retrograde but poetically superlative Philip Larkin, Wagner's lunatic ideological positions, racist politics, and rotten mix of megalomania and narcissism in personal life discoloured his achievements as an artist - which are on nearly the same scale as the composer he worshipped, Beethoven. The polarization of views over Wagner's music was always severe, and in his lifetime German music lovers were either classicist Brahmsians or romantic Wagnerians. This dilemma was subsequently compounded by Hitler's special preference for Wagner as the musical avant garde of the Nazis, which corresponded with Mussolini's adoption of Pietro Mascagni, the composer of Cavalleria Rusticana, for Italian Fascist purposes. Hitler might not have had such an easy time roping in Wagner were it not for the fact that the composer had given extremely explicit utterance to his venomous view of Jewry. The chief essay by Wagner in this context, titled 'Das Judentum in der Musik [Jewishness in Music]', was published in 1850. It attacks Jewish musicians, specifically Mendelssohn, for lacking the cultural roots and resources required to compose stupendous music. Wagner wanted to leave no one in any doubt that he, as a true German of ancient stock, was composing music to fulfil an ideological dream. This is rather ironic, for 20th century research on Wagner's antecedents suggests that his putative stepfather, Ludwig Geyer, was both his real father and a Jew. The further the artist's medium from verbal representations of nature and society, the more complicated it becomes to offer conclusive judgments about the degree of interconnection and interpenetration between his ideology and his art. It is not entirely easy, but not altogether contextually difficult either, to demonstrate that Larkin's view of marriage, women and labour is not particularly pleasant, from the poem which begins, 'Oh, no one can deny/ That Arnold is less selfish than I./ He married a woman to stop her getting away/ Now she's there all day/ And the money he gets for wasting his life on work/ She takes as her perk.' But it becomes more complicated if you try to unearth Salvador Dali's sadistic relations with women from his paintings, because paintings 'speak' of the world with greater indirection than a poem. Orwell, in an essay on this subject, describes Dali as possessing 'a diseased intelligence', and as having 'as good an outfit of perversions as anyone could wish for'. But in coming to these conclusions, Orwell utilizes Dali's autobiographical writings to understand his paintings ['Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali']. Wagner was neither a pervert nor straightforwardly repulsive like Dali, but what really complicates the issue of the relationship between politics and art in his case is the medium - that is, music-drama (Wagner's term for something transcending traditional opera). This is not a form which 'speaks' of the world in a language translatable into everyday statements, which is precisely why Wagner sought to back it up with explanatory and programmatic writings. It is in fact impossible to arrive at disparaging judgments of Wagner just by listening to his music, without recourse to his fictional, autobiographical and critical writings. On the other hand, anyone with an ear for the classical music of Europe or an instinctive appreciation of Western melody who has never read Wagner's sometimes deranged essays is unlikely to have much problem in developing a deep love of what is essentially Wagnerian - his music. Beyond a point, no one who really listens to music cares about the personal character or the politics of the man who wrote it. The possibilities of experiencing music as the only form unsullied by real life are considerable: it is more possible and credible to separate out the chaff-politics from the grain-art in relation to music. Lovers of Larkin cannot quite escape his views because they sometimes lurk like shadows at the fringes of his words; and it is difficult to disagree with Orwell on Dali because he pinpoints the threads which connect the personal psychology of sadism with its transformation into surrealist art. In both Larkin and Dali there are irrefutable shreds of political contamination which eat into the art. But it surely makes no difference to any serious listener's experience of Cavalleria Rusticana to know that its composer was a Mussolini sympathizer. Ottorino Respighi, ArturoToscanini and Bruno Walter, who managed to stay clear of dictators, made music no better than Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan, who did not. Politicians use music and musicians for their own ends. Lovers of music instinctively know they cannot, following the same logic, like or dislike composers for their politics. Musicians are often political innocents who sensibly or instinctively keep clear of politics: Mozart is a case in point. Research on the sociology of music shows that the posthumous iconic status of composers depends upon the nature of the regime in power. Beethoven was almost as comprehensively appropriated into the Nazi pantheon as Wagner, yet when the Berlin wall crashed in 1989 his music was deployed to signal the Brotherhood of Man. To protest against Wagner's music because he was idiot enough to despise the Jews is merely to accept the twisted logic of politics. It is to fail to recognize the paradox that a man can be an utter swine and yet musically a god.