I recall seeing an interview with composer Steve Reich who compared Wagner with one of his contemporary composers, someone whom I'd never heard of, nor can recall the name of now. The upshot was that this other composer had as charitable and philanthropic and humanistic reputation as Wagner's was as an anti-Semite and a miserable prick. How is it to be reconciled that Wagner's music was so inspired while the other fellow's was mediocre and forgettable?

"As to aesthetics and morals I believe they are essentially not connected - though we dearly, naively, would like them to be. We have only to think of Wagner, a Nazi and simultaneously a musical genius.