Two very thoughtful posts there, so cheers to keberoxu and robomatic. Wagner thought he was changing the world via his music dramas, but, apart from the influences that keberoxu alluded to (which in my view shackled those composers), he really didn't change much at all, and I'd suggest that you'd find it hard to find many twentieth century composers after Debussy who showed that influence to any significant extent. OK, Richard Strauss. I love Strauss and I've tussled very hard with myself to exonerate him sufficiently from Nazi influences in my mind (I've managed it). I find a beauty and lyricism and humanity in Strauss's music that I can't find in any Wagner, not even the Siegfried Idyll. Long before I read the one book I'd bought that pointed sharply to Wagner's vicious antisemitism, I'd found his music to be overinflated, overblown and full of ego, not to speak of replete with longeurs. I haven't experienced the phenomenon outlined by robomatic, but I'd say that suddenly deciding you don't like a piece of classical music because you've just discovered something unsavoury about the composer would mark you out as somewhat feeble-minded. My view is that composers are human beings with human failings like the rest of us, and their amazing talent in their field doesn't make them saints. Schubert and Benjamin Britten both had alleged predilections for the "company" of the underaged. I love Schubert and dislike Britten. I'd better try to unravel myself I suppose (but not un-Ravel myself - he's one of my very favourites). My beef with Wagner and Karajan is that they mixed up their disgusting and detestable politics with the genre of music that I love the most, in their different ways, and that obliges me to blank them out of my life. A personal view only.