Of course, in his later years, Wagner under the influence of Schopenhauer reversed Feuerbach’s evolutionary chronology, reverting to the traditional religious view that the real world was a product of spirit, in some vague sense:
“Reality surely to be explained by Ideality, not the other way round. A religious dogma may embrace the whole real world: let anyone try, on the contrary, to illustrate Religion from the real world.” [896W-{78-82?} Notes of uncertain date, presumably from 1878-1882: PW Vol. VIII, p. 391]
But this was not the philosophy which guided him in writing the Ring libretto. In his later years, after his 1854 conversion to Schopenhauer’s philosophy, but also after Wagner had completed the Ring libretto and a significant portion of its music, Wagner made some effort to disavow his former
Feuerbachian assumption that the physical world is the basis for all that man incorrectly describes as the spiritual and transcendent world. But it was too late: Feuerbach’s atheist philosophy is central to all of Wagner’s post-1854 music-dramas.
Now we must, as was inevitable, enter upon a domain of notorious yet unavoidable controversy, the question of Wagner’s anti-Semitism and whether it influenced him in writing the Ring’s libretto and music. I must introduce it here because the distinctions we have delineated above between Alberich and Wotan, the Nibelungs and the Valhallan gods, are similar in many respects to Wagner’s distinction between Judaism and Christianity. Much of this Wagner derives, again, from Feuerbach. I will argue throughout this study that though Wagner was anti-Semitic in his private life, the distinctions he draws between sympathetic and unsympathetic characters in the Ring are universalized in such a way that racism is left far behind. For instance, Franz Liszt once noted (in a remark whose source I’ve forgotten) that what Wagner means when he says “Jew” is actually a cultural philistine. The point here is not that Wagner is absolved of the charge of racism in using the word Jew to describe a person of any race who he really thinks is a philistine, but rather, that we can best grasp the universal meaning of the Ring if we stick to the concept philistine in its universal sense when ever we are inclined to read a Jewish stereotype into one of Wagner’s characters or incidents in the Ring. In other words, we are not going to be able to grasp the breadth of vision of the Ring if we insist on looking for topical meanings when a universal, generic meaning is far more explanatory. We will find this to be true again and again in our analysis.
Under the sway of Feuerbach, Wagner identified Judaism as a worldly, earthly religion, which for him was motivated by egoism, and insofar as Christianity owed anything to its Jewish roots, it was, according to Wagner, tainted by this debt. This is at least in part a basis for Wotan’s (Light-Alberich’s) dependence upon Alberich’s actions (his forging of the Ring and accumulation of a Hoard of treasure) to pay off his other debt to the Giants, so Wotan can establish Valhalla as the gods’ refuge. It is also the cause of Wotan’s desperation to deny or escape the consequences of this dependence on Alberich, a dependence which was implicit in any case in the founding of Valhalla on the basis of Alberich’s Ring-power (i.e., #19>#20a). In our following extract, Feuerbach gives Wagner his cue:
“Judaism is worldly Christianity; Christianity, spiritual Judaism.” [88F-EOC: p. 120]
