Wagner and the Jews

Notwithstanding his public utterances against Jewish influence in music, and even his utterances against specific Jews, Wagner had numerous Jewish friends and supporters even in his later period.

Included amongst these were his favourite conductor Hermann Levi, the pianists Carl Tausig and Joseph Rubinstein, the writer Heinrich Porges and very many others.

In his autobiography, written between 1865 and 1870, he declared that his acquaintance with the Jew Samuel Lehrs whom he knew in Paris in the early 1840s was ``one of the most beautiful friendships of my life''. There remain, therefore, elements of the enigmatic, and of the opportunist, in Wagner's personal attitude towards Jews.