I'm going to go against the current here and say that I love Wagner, so much so that if I could spend the rest of my life with only one piece of music, it would be Parsifal. I'm a huge Beethoven fan, and I like Brahms and Vaughn Williams and Delius and Schoenberg and R Strauss and Stravinsky, but for me, it's Wagner who is god-tier with Parsifal, Tristan, Meistersingers, and to a lesser extent, the Ring.
You can go a few ways when getting into Wagner. A good recommendation on the orchestral route is Georg Solti conducting Vienna on a disc called Orchestral Favorites, which includes most of the preludes and overtures, plus the Siegfried Idyll. Another way would be to just jump in and get a good recording of an opera. Tannhauser and Lohengrin are easy to start with, but if you want to see what makes Wagner special, I'd suggest Parsifal and Tristan. I like historic recordings from the Bayreuth festival, since the place sounds a little different than other halls. My favorites are Hans Knappertsbusch's 1962 Parsifal and Karl Bohm's 1967 Tristan. I think the 60s were a golden era, with a great batch of singers getting a little older, but with the introduction of stereo sound. Tristan is probably a little more accessible to start.
I also recommend reading about Wagner if you really want to get it. My two favorite authors are Ernest Newman, who wrote a definitive guide called The Wagner Operas, and this Canuck named M Owen Lee, who wrote this nice, handy guide to the Ring called Turning the Sky Round. G B Shaw also wrote a controversial book way back when on the Ring as an anticapitalist allegory called The Perfect Wagnerite that I like a good deal.
As far as the man himself goes: I think he gets a worse reputation than he deserves. It's not his fault that Hitler liked a few of his operas. Keep in mind that several of the operas could not be performed during the Third Reich because of philosophical differences. I'm not going to argue he was a good man, but I also don't really give a shit. Like most artists, the best part of himself went into his art, and that's what endures and what matters to me.
