Richard Wagner’s personal shortcomings are well known. A new book lays it out in unstinting detail. “It’s all here: how often Wagner sponged off others, how many women succumbed to his psoriatic charms, what creditors he swindled, where he fled and why, what he said about Jews, how he used everybody, what friends and supporters (from the great Liszt to the sad Ludwig II) he bad-mouthed and in one way or another betrayed. Of course, how he could attract so many absolutely impassioned admirers is far less easy to understand than how he came to quarrel with most of them. But if charisma is puzzling when one doesn’t feel it oneself even in the case of contemporaries, how much more puzzling for this long-dead, repulsive little man, Wagner.”