Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (review)

Abstract

Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. By Roger Scruton. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. [vi, 238 p. ISBN 0-19-516691-4. $25.] Bibliography, index. Wagner's music dramas famously, and problematically, are meant issue in redemption, whether it be that of central characters (the Flying Dutchman, Tannhauser, Amfortas, Kundry, or Parsifal), whole fictional society or world represented in drama (the Ring cycle), or, more fundamentally, audience itself. What exactly, outside of any concrete theological doctrine, is be understood by such is difficult determine. For audience of these or any similarly ambitious works of it could best be regarded as kind of broadly spiritual benediction such art is capable of conveying: an enhanced perspective quality of human being-in-the-world, a finer awareness of emotional, moral, and psychological negotiations that constitute our lives. In pondering manifestations of sex (or erotic love) and sacred in Tristan und Isolde, Roger Scruton attempts ground lofty claims of Wagnerian music drama such redemptive power in a more detailed argument about how art (and specifically Wagner's art) might reinvest modern life with experience of sense of a re-sacralized world beyond or after hegemony of any traditional religious belief-system. The ambition is very much in tune with that voiced by Wagner himself with regard his mature oeuvre. How persuasively it might be realized for modern-day audience (or reader) in specific case of Tristan und Isolde would be measure of success of Scruton's deeply felt enterprise. Wagner's music dramas all trade in currency of sacred, Scruton maintains (p. 7), and much of his effort is devoted tracing circulation of their sacred themes back pre-Christian origins, through European middle ages, and into other world religions and cultures (ancient Greece remaining always close hand). For Scruton, as for Wagner himself, a great potential of music drama is that of preserving and renewing functions of religion and ritual in modern era. This can be located in characteristic focus of Wagner's dramas on acts of sacrifice, sacred loves, and sacrilege done love by faithlessness and forgetting. They involve intense moments of consecration, in which is both courted and spurned. And their premodern setting acquaints us with a world in which rituals, oaths, and acts of heroic sacrifice are in no way seen as intrusions into human normality but are taken for granted, as windows in empirical world that look out transcendental, (p. 8) By contrast, modern world of Wagner's own day, and all more our own, suffers from a fatal disenchantment which his operas, so Scruton (like Wagner) believes, have power counteract. Their revitalization of religious myths, sacraments, heroic sacrifice, and idealized love (revitalized above all by means of a wholly modern musical language) can help us to understand what redemption could mean when detached from every promise of a life after death (p. 14), traditional promise of religion, and re-sacralize our understanding of world and our selves in it in a newly viable way. The agenda is that of nineteenth-century Kunstreligion or the religion of art, a concept Scruton does not invoke directly, although his arguments are all essentially founded it. The book's seven chapters enclose, in chapters 2 through 4, what is essentially a traditional-though always eloquent and well-informed-critical introduction opera, glossing drama's medieval legendary and literary sources (chapter 2), nature of Wagner's musical-dramatic adaptation (chapter 3) and an extensive discussion of challenging, intensely expressive compositional idiom of Tristan und Isolde (chapter 4). …