I tend to follow this whole thread of composer attitudes fairly
sporadically, because it would drive me nuts trying to figure out whose
attitudes were so detestable that I shouldn't listen to their music
anymore.

OK, maybe Wagner was anti-Semitic.  Maybe he wrote music that could be
construed as such.  I also know of (Jewish) musicians that won't perform
the Bach St. John Passion, because they believe that the text is pretty
explicitly anti-Semitic.  I've read a column by Richard Taruskin where he
states the same thing.  Does that make Bach an anti-Semite? I don't know,
because I haven't studied his non-musical writings.  Just asking.

Heck, it doesn't even have to do with anti-Semitism.  Look at the libretti
of some of Mozart's operas to see an attitude toward women that raises
hackles to this day.  Not to mention the non-literal translations one hears
of Monostatos' lines in "The Magic Flute," to avoid some delicate racial
overtones.

Going back even farther, how about the Renaissance and the Reformation,
where European Christians were slaughtering each other by the thousands.
Some of the most gloriously beautiful music of that (or any) era--masses by
Palestrina or Victoria, for example--were products of countries that burned
people as much as they did firewood.  If we found a letter in Palestrina's
hand, or Victoria's, that condoned mass heretic burnings, or the forced
conversion of Jews, would that change the beauty or power of their music?
I do wonder how it must have been for a composer like the Englishman John
Taverner, who was born during the reign of Henry VII, and spent his career
living through the turbulent era of Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and
Elizabeth, trying to figure out whether the type of music he was writing
(or had written!) might get him sent to the Tower.  Perhaps The Truth
wasn't so simple in those days.  There isn't much to the historical record
of those times, at least to the same extent as there must be for Wagner, so
these are just hypothetical questions.

I certainly haven't sorted out my own attitude toward these issues.
But it seems that we spend a lot of time on this List trying to divine
what a composer meant when he said a certain thing, or indicated a certain
metronome marking, or whether he would have "preferred" modern instruments
to the ones he had then, etc.  A lot of people (me included) think that
it's often useless to try to figure those things out.  So can we always
know their attitudes toward things that had little to do with their craft?

Sorry about the rambling, but I certainly don't have the answers.

Bill H.