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

Wagner's music dramas famously, and problematically, are meant to issue in "redemption," whether it be that of the central characters (the "Flying Dutchman," Tannhäuser, Amfortas, Kundry, or Parsifal), the whole fictional society or world represented in the drama (the Ring cycle), or, more fundamentally, the audience itself. What exactly, outside of any concrete theological doctrine, is to be understood by such "redemption" is difficult to determine. For the audience of these or any similarly ambitious works of art, it could best be regarded as the kind of broadly spiritual "benediction" such art is capable of conveying: an enhanced perspective on the quality of human "being-in-the-world," a finer awareness of the emotional, moral, and psychological negotiations that constitute our lives. In pondering the manifestations of sex (or "erotic love") and the sacred in Tristan und Isolde, Roger Scruton attempts to ground the lofty claims of Wagnerian music drama to such redemptive power in a more detailed argument about how art (and specifically Wagner's art) might reinvest modern life with the experience of the sacred, the sense of a "re-sacralized" world beyond or after the hegemony of any traditional religious belief-system. The ambition is very much in tune with that voiced by Wagner himself with regard to his mature oeuvre. How persuasively it might be realized for the modern-day audience (or reader) in the specific case of Tristan und Isolde would be the measure of success of Scruton's deeply felt enterprise.

Wagner's music dramas all trade in the "currency of the sacred," Scruton maintains (p. 7), and much of his effort is devoted to tracing the circulation of their sacred themes back to pre-Christian origins, through the European middle ages, and into other world religions and cultures (ancient Greece remaining always close to hand). For Scruton, as for Wagner himself, a great potential of the music drama is that of preserving and renewing the functions of religion and ritual in the modern era. This can be located in the characteristic focus of Wagner's dramas "on acts of sacrifice, on sacred loves, and on the sacrilege done to love by faithlessness and forgetting."

They involve intense moments of consecration, in which death 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 the human normality but are taken for granted, as windows in the empirical world that look out on the transcendental.

(p. 8)

By contrast, the modern world of Wagner's own day, and all the more our own, suffers from a fatal "disenchantment" which his operas, so Scruton (like Wagner) believes, have the power to 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), the traditional promise of religion, and to "re-sacralize" our understanding of the 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 on 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 to the opera, glossing the drama's medieval legendary and literary sources (chapter 2), the nature of Wagner's musical-dramatic adaptation (chapter 3) and an extensive discussion of the challenging, intensely expressive compositional idiom of Tristan und Isolde (chapter 4). The detailed commentary on the text, characters, and action of Wagner's drama in chapter 3 is also an exemplary attempt to integrate a feeling for...