Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in Wagner's Ring

Mark Berry explores the political and religious ideas expounded in Wagner''s Ring through close attention to the text and drama, the multifarious intellectual influences upon the composer during the work''s lengthy gestation and composition, and the wealth of Wagner source material. Many of his writings are explicitly political in their concerns, for Wagner was emphatically not a revolutionary solely for the sake of art. Yet it would be misleading to see even the most ''political'' tracts as somehow divorced from the aesthetic realm; Wagner''s radical challenge to liberal-democratic politics makes no such distinction. This book considers Wagner''s treatment of various worlds: nature, politics, economics, and metaphysics, in order to explain just how radical that challenge is. Classical interpretations have tended to opt either for an ''optimistic'' view of the Ring, centred upon the influence of Young Hegelian thought - in particular the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach - and Wagner''s c