Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 

— John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

The last act of my first and only live performance of Tristan and Isolde was nearing its end, and I had grown restless. There is not a lot of leg room at the Metropolitan Opera House, especially in the cheap seats (which, by the way, are not cheap), and Richard Wagner’s opera about love and death was almost four hours old. And then came “Der Liebestod,” the famous aria in which Isolde sings over Tristan’s dead body and then dies herself as the curtain comes down.

I was blown away. The aria is 18 minutes long, and as I sat listening, my knees stopped aching and my body stopped twitching. Even though I am tone deaf, I had never heard such beauty as this music. After sitting in stunned silence for a few minutes, I joined the rest of the audience in a long standing ovation.

The composer of “Der Liebestod” was a terrible human being, a virulent antisemite who, in his essay, “Jewishness in Music,” railed against Jewish artists for degrading European culture. Fifty years after his death, he would become Hitler’s favorite composer.

This contradiction has presented a problem for many, especially in Wagner’s homeland. In a New York Times review of a Wagner exhibit in Berlin (“Germany Reckons with Wagner: Cultural Jewel, or National Shame?”), the critic, Ben Miller, leads with, “Few composers inspire such a mix of appreciation and disgust as Richard Wagner.” How can a person create such achingly beautiful music, while simultaneously espousing such vile opinions? How can a virulent anti-Semite have also composed “Der Liebestod,” which made me cry the first time I heard it?

We all know of artists who are mean-spirited, cantankerous, egotistical. Picasso comes to mind, as does Hemingway, as not especially nice people. Ezra Pound was a narcissist and psychopath who praised both eugenics and the Holocaust. Norman Mailer almost stabbed his wife to death. The list goes on and on. In fact, it may well be longer than the list of sympathetic artists. And while it shouldn’t be surprising that geniuses are complicated and often ill-tempered, I like to think that beauty comes from a fundamentally good heart.

We live in world where new atrocities are uncovered almost daily, where nastiness is admired and meanness is too often mistaken for strength, where bullies masquerade as saviors. None of this is new, of course, but I want to believe that art offers an alternative – a more uplifting – view. That’s why one of the first acts of dictators after seizing power is to silence the artists – as if beauty itself were subversive of autocratic rule. Which I believe it to be.

And that brings me back to Richard Wagner. I will never know how a person with such venom in his soul could produce such beautiful music. This business of good and evil, it seems, is more complicated than it might at first appear. But I do believe this: that the world needs beauty, perhaps now more than ever.