THERE HAVE BEEN few if any composers with interests as varied as Wagner’s, and certainly none has devoted so much time to weighing in on matters other than the purely musical. His Gesamtkunstwerk was to fuse poetry, music, dramatic action, dance, and the scenic arts, but even this was not enough for him; he read and wrote on history, geography, literary theory, aesthetics, religion, and philosophy, too, setting out his ideas in letters, articles, and books, and urging his favorite authors on his friends.

This sounds like the worst kind of dilettantism and intellectual overreaching. The composer Peter Cornelius, later a friend, had gently mocked him when he had his barber of Baghdad claim to be a comprehensive genius, ein Gesamtgenie. Later generations have been less kind on this score and not at all affectionate. Wagner's claims were so immodest, and his personal qualities so mixed—to put it mildly—that we almost want him to fail at least somewhere. What Auden saw in him sounds like a cosmic injustice: by what rights could such “an extraordinary genius” also be “an absolute shit?”

Wagner's legion of adoring friends would have disagreed, but that combination may well be the truth, hard though it is to swallow. It is difficult to deny Wagner's greatness as a composer, though there are those who do, and his theatrical craft can hardly be gainsaid. He was indeed a master of the art of transition, and the music dramas are object lessons in structuring the ebb and flow of long works; even a merely competent performance will hold one's interest.

IT IS OFTEN said that the Ring was written backwards and composed forwards. This is not far from the truth, but the reality is, as always, more complicated than the quip. It is true that Wagner originally wrote the text for a single opera, Siegfrieds Tod, the first version of what would ultimately become Götterdämmerung. He then realized that Siegfrieds Tod could not stand alone, so he wrote a prequel, Der junge Siegfried, which in its final form became Siegfried. That did not solve the problem, either. Audiences would still have needed a good deal of background information to make sense of what was going on, and imparting this verbally was apt to be confusing or tedious and would carry too little emotional weight; as Wagner wrote to Liszt, “a work of art … can only make its rightful impression if the poetic intent is fully presented to the senses in every one of its important moments.”1 Events conveyed through narrative would not work well with Wagner's evolving language of musicaldramatic motifs and their development, either, as Carl Dahlhaus explains:

MUCH OF THE philosophy of Wagner's time, and certainly his own, evokes and tries to make manifest a dynamic identity of unity and difference. For Wagner this is the interplay of a shared, primordial necessity with its splintered reflection in individual experience; the first is ungraspable but is present as feeling, the second is present as conscious thought but can never escape the limits of self-consciousness. Neither can stand alone or be reduced to the other. They must be thought together.

It is that vision that dictates the very structure of Wagnerian music drama, which develops a unity-in-difference between poetry and music and between the actions and voices of the characters on stage and a continuously transforming orchestral fabric. These are essentially different reflections of an inexpressible oneness. The web of motivic development does not merely accompany the singers, but neither are the singers reduced to the status of extra color in the instrumental palette or additional threads in the orchestral tapestry. The poles are never merged. Instead, each one interacts with the other.

Wagner had finished the poem of the Ring by the end of 1852. He first read Schopenhauer almost two years later, in October, 1854, when he was working on the composition of Die Walküre, and The World as Will and Representation was, he told Liszt, “like a gift from heaven.” He wrote to Röckel that Schopenhauer's philosophy “completely demolishes the nonsense and charlatanism of the Fichte-Schelling-Hegel view,” and that it repudiated what he now thought of as the “heartless unreasoning optimism” of Judaism. The philosopher had somehow known what he himself had intuited but not recognized, that the Ring was a demonstration of the nothingness of all existence, and Schopenhauer's ideas had led him to “the only adequate key-stone to my poem in keeping with the whole idea of the drama, which consists in a simple and sincere recognition of the true relations of things and complete abstinence from the attempt to preach any particular doctrine.” Yet he left the text of the dramas and their all-important stage directions unchanged. With respect to the Ring Schopenhauer offered little, it seems, but an after-the-fact interpretation, making Wagner the first of the many commentators on his work.

The suddenness of this conversion calls for an explanation. Wagner’s own thinking had looked back to the philosophy of the first quarter of the century, and he may well have felt an affinity for Schopenhauer because Schopenhauer was, in reality, firmly in the tradition of early German idealism. The philosopher's persistent polemics against “the Fichte-Schelling- Hegel view,” as Günter Zöller says, “appear more as deliberate attempts to distance himself from competing approaches and to more starkly highlight his own philosophical contributions than might have been warranted by the fact of the matter.”

The unrestrained circulation of foreign texts and ideas was seen by English authors from the mid-seventeenth to the early eighteenth century as a central factor in enabling the crisis. Significant portions of book sales catalogues and inventories of private libraries of individuals belonging to the English educated elite consisted of books written and/or published in Europe, which came to England mostly in Latin, or in French vernacular via the Dutch Republic and France, and which were often translated into English to satisfy a growing demand for foreign books and ideas. However, not all these books exerted the same impact on English intellectual culture. The analysis of English debates shows that there were just a few authors and books that most recurrently appear in contemporary discussion about the crisis and that generated serious apprehension for their actual or potential impact on a rapidly expanding readership. In this chapter, I will focus on the reception of the ideas and works of Descartes and Spinoza, and examine the contemporaries’ perception of their impact on English culture. Other names appear in English accounts of intellectual change, such as those of Galileo, Socinus, Gassendi and Bayle, and developments in disciplines other than natural philosophy, such as biblical scholarship, were accused of generating the crisis. But the main targets of apologetic literature in England were the French and the Dutch philosophers.

Although the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza differ in many aspects including, most notably, the ‘mind-body problem’, the two authors were often coupled as promoters of a new mechanical strand of philosophy that, according to their early modern detractors, had potentially disruptive consequences for the churches and organised religion.

WAGNER SEEMS to have had, at best, an ambivalent attitude towards philosophy. His autobiography is not always a reliable source, and there are reasons to doubt his memory of his first encounter with Feuerbach, but it still provides an illuminating account of his early interest in the subject:

In 1732, the Archdeacon of Middlesex and ‘chaplain in ordinary to his Majesty’ Daniel Waterland (1683–1740) published Christianity Vindicated Against Infidelity, in which he complained how ordinary people debated ‘in shops and stalls’ about the ‘cavils of Spinosa and Hobbs’, the present canon of Scripture was ‘disputed’ and priests were ‘without distinction traduced as imposers on the credulity of mankind’. Waterland explicitly ascribed attacks on Scripture and the clergy to the increasing diffusion in England of ideas developed abroad:

I know not if these licentious principles were the proper produce of our own soil, or may not be rather said to have been transplanted hither from abroad, where it is certain they had taken root and spread, for a hundred years or more, before they met with any favourable reception […] in this grave and serious, and for the most part well-disposed Kingdom.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English authors were conscious of the widespread diffusion and potentially destabilising impact of European texts and ideas on English culture and religion. Especially after the lapse in 1695 of the Licensing Act ‘for preventing the frequent abuses in printing seditious treasonable and unlicensed books and pamphlets’, the writings of modern French and Dutch philosophers and biblical scholars were advertised in almost every booklist and newspaper.

Wagner was working on the score of Act Two of Siegfried when he started having second thoughts. He had begun Das Rheingold in 1853, but now, in 1857, he was ready to give up his “headstrong design of completing the Nibelungen.” He put Siegfried aside, picked it up again to complete the second act, and then stopped work on it altogether. He could see no way for the Ring to be produced, and so he decided to write something more commercially viable, a drama on a smaller scale that would be within the capacities of lesser opera houses.

The result was Tristan und Isolde, which does have a small cast but which grew to be so demanding and avant-garde that after seventy rehearsals the Vienna Court Opera, one of the greatest of European theaters, gave up trying to mount the premiere. His next project was Die Meistersinger, the longest piece in the operatic repertory, which he was working on when, in 1864, Ludwig II was crowned king of Bavaria. The young king was obsessed with Wagner, and he sent his idol an emissary— whom Wagner turned away at first, thinking he was a hoaxer—and promised to settle the composer's debts and see to the production of all of his works, the Ring included. By the time Wagner had finished Die Meistersinger and returned to the cycle eleven years had passed, but everything went well, and at the end of February 1869 he could write to his wife and King Ludwig that “Siegfried is divine. It is my greatest work!” He expected that it would become the most popular drama in the cycle.

That never happened. Die Walküre is usually the audience favorite and many musicians and scholars prefer Götterdämmerung.3 Siegfried is often the least liked of the four, in fact. Too many male voices, people say; too much fairy tale and not enough human drama.

In 1706, Anthony Collins observed that the ‘nature of God question’ was esteemed already by the greatest among the ancient philosophers ‘as one of the most abstruse and difficult questions in all philosophy’. However, ‘the light of the Gospel, together with that clear and distinct method of reasoning introduced by the new philosophy’ concurred to establish that only his attributes were knowledgeable. In the opinion ‘of the generality of Christians, and particularly of our modern divines and philosophers’, God possessed the attributes of perfection (he is a ‘wise, good, powerful and eternal being’), so he could not coincide with the universe and must be separated from it. ‘But this age, fruitful in disputes of all kinds, and that suffers no question to lie unexamin’d […] has given a new turn to the question about the nature of God.’ The ‘turn’, to Collins, was a sceptical one, and it consisted in a recovery of the ancient notion of the ‘obscurity’ of ‘the nature of God question’. Collins aimed to explain to an English readership the historical reason for such a recovery of a sceptical attitude towards understanding God. For this purpose, he introduced the question by concisely illustrating different points of view confronting each other in a debate opposing Bayle (whose doctrine consisted in ‘captivating the understanding to the obedience of faith’), to the rationaux Isaac Jacquelot and Le Clerc, the Calvinist ‘Mr. Naudé’ and ‘Mr Placette’ and, last but not least, the prime target of his pamphlet, Archbishop King's sermon The Origine Mali, written in response to Bayle, which sought to accommodate God's ‘foreknowledge’ with the justification of evil.

In Christianity Vindicated against Infidelity, Bishop Waterland ascribed the increasing diffusion in England of a view of the clergy as ‘imposers’ directly to the ideas of Hobbes and Spinoza. This assertion could be hastily dismissed as an orthodox defence of the basis of belief and identity of the Anglican Church resulting from the processes of confessionalisation and of the reconstruction of orthodoxy ongoing almost everywhere in seventeenth-century Europe. After all, there is hardly anything new in this partisan justification of the peculiarity of the English Church with respect to other religious and intellectual traditions developed in Europe. Almost one century earlier and with a similar purpose, English bishops warned their students in theology not to read foreign authors, specifically those accused of ‘Arminianism’. They invited students rather to rely – to use the words of Robert Skinner, Bishop of Bristol – on ‘our own excellent writers’ Jewel, Hooker, Bilson and Andrewes, as guides to the reading ‘of the Fathers, Councils and the schools’. Nonetheless, the quotation from Waterland suggests seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English authors were aware of the profound diffusion and impact of European ideas about church authority and ‘priestcraft’ on English religious and ecclesiological debates.

The intellectual climate of the crisis occurring in England and Europe was characterised by a confrontation between a widespread spirit of anticlericalism and an intellectual strand of apologetics, which often recurred to the arguments and languages of its ‘atheist’ and ‘sceptic’ adversaries to defend organised church and religion. The development of biblical scholarship and the diffusion of debates about the relationship between reason and Revelation, philosophy and theology, nature and the supernatural examined earlier had an effect on the interpretation of biblical passages concerning the nature of priesthood and thereby challenged existing assumptions about the nature and functions of church authority.

When the curtain rises in Die Walküre, we see a primitive house built around a huge ash tree. A storm is dying down and a warrior unlatches the door and stumbles in, wounded and weaponless; Wagner says that “he has the appearance of someone overwrought by excessive struggle; his clothes and the way he looks suggest he is a fugitive.” This is Siegmund, the great hero that Wotan has fathered and raised and the key player in the god's “great idea” for snatching the Ring from Fafner and ensuring that Alberich never regains it. His part in Wotan's plotting has all but destroyed him.

A moment later a woman enters from a back room: Sieglinde. Her life, too, has been torn from her thanks to her unasked-for role in Wotan's scheme. Motherless, lost to the rest of her family, forced into a marriage that is little more than legally sanctioned rape, she can barely acknowledge her own existence. When Siegmund asks her name she “wants to give an honest answer, but thinks better of it.” She exists in the third person: this house and this woman are Hunding's own, she tells him.

Die Walküre has always been the popular favorite of the Ring dramas, but, as Dahlhaus writes, its “overwhelming spell … emanates less from the whole, for it is no whole, than from individual acts, the first and the third.” That spell is even more selective than Dahlhaus suggests; what remain most vividly in memory from the first act, which is often and effectively presented by itself as a concert piece, are the matchless delicacy of its evocation of dawning love and the theatrical grandiosity of its climax, the door's opening to let spring flood into the hall, Siegmund's heroic but tender Winterstürme, and his drawing the sword from the tree.

This book investigates the transformations that occurred in English religious and intellectual culture from at least the 1650s to the early eighteenth century in light of the triangular circulation and reception of books and ideas between England, France and the Dutch Republic made possible by the attainment of centrality in the history of mediation by print culture and by the peculiar dynamics of the book market in that transnational context. I argue that such a process of intellectual and textual exchange, which involved not just Latin-speaking educated readers but also those in England who were versed in modern European languages, was a decisive factor in enabling a process of ‘destabilization’ and ‘reconfiguration’ of English culture. Contemporaries largely perceived these processes as a consequence of the spread of ‘atheism’, ‘deism’ and ‘scepticism’, and largely cognised change by setting it within the broader cultural framework of the confrontation between ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’.

Unlike scholarly attempts to square such a process within the spatial- temporal coordinates either of the ‘crisis of the European mind’ or of the Enlightenment, what I dubbed the ‘crisis of English mind’ would be better understood as a period in which various long-term and short-term national and transnational disrupting dynamics – spanning the agony of ‘Christianised’ Aristotelianism and the inter-confessional religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – concurred to generate a set of debates that tackled some fundamental issues of early modern culture, religion and society.