ABSTRACT
‘In the evening, I read him Dollinger’s speech about the Church of England. “Always politics,” R. says, “I see nothing of religion. Not a word about the wonderful dogma of redemption.”, 1 Wagner’s attitude towards religion had undergone considerable transformation when Cosima recorded that reaction. Christianity and its redemptive agency had risen in his estimation; he was more readily inclined to separate religion from politics, a development to be attributed in large part to the influence of Schopenhauer. For the younger Wagner, less ambiguously aligned with Young Hegelianism, the two were far less readily separated. Valhalla could represent both. Political and religious concerns inform both divine myth and heroic drama, on account of the widespread belief, to cite Bakunin, that the state was ‘currently in the throes of the deepest internal conflict, for without religion, without a powerful universal conviction,’ the state was indeed impossible. 2
