Larry Sherwood:

>John Cambre claims that although Wagner was "petty, vituperative and
>occasionally anti-Semetic", his art "show[ed] none of that".  I don't
>believe that is true.  True, perhaps his pettiness did not come through
>in his music.  But Wagner endowed the nasty Nibelung in the Ring with a
>stereotypic Jewish physiognomy and features, and I suspect he intended his
>description to reflect his estimation of the Jewish people.  FWIW I don't
>see Wagner as "occasionally" anti-Semitic: I think he was a thoroughgoing
>anti-Semite.

LSherwood misrepresents my statement; I was making a distinction between
Wagner the composer and Wagner the polemicist.  Wagner the man may have
indeed have been, as LSherwood asserts, a thoroughgoing anti-Semite, but
I was talking about the man's nonmusical output; his writings display an
interest in a wide variety of social and political causes of his time, only
one aspect of which was his scabrous anti-Semitic writings.  That's all I
was saying.

John Cambre