Music: Wagner, Bootlicker

Biographers who have pictured Composer Richard Wagner as a bit of a blackguard, a touch of a toady, had some added evidence last week. Musical Courier printed some early Wagnerian letters, extracted from a Swiss musical journal by Robert Hernried, Viennese refugee and music professor at St. Ambrose College, Davenport, Iowa.

In his later years, Wagner was one of Germany's prime anti-Semites. He wrote Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music), in Oper und Drama attacked a Jewish composer—Giacomo Meyerbeer (born Jakob Beer, of a Berlin banking family). But in the...

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