Scruton.00 FM 9/29/03 11:11 AM Page i - This page intentionally left blank Scruton.00 FM 9/29/03 11:11 AM Page iii Death-Devoted Heart Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde 1 Scruton.00 FM 9/29/03 11:11 AM Page iv 1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright © by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Scruton, Roger. Death-devoted heart : sex and the sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde / Roger Scruton. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN --- .Wagner, Richard, ‒. Tristan und Isolde. I. Title. ML.WS .—dc Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper Scruton.00 FM 9/29/03 11:11 AM Page v This is a book about Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde; it is also an attempt to gain insight into the nature of erotic love and the peculiar place of the erotic in our culture. The argument is sometimes philosophical, some- times critical, sometimes musicological. But I intend the result as a guide to Wagner’s great music drama and as a vindication of its stature. The originality and subtlety of Wagner’s music have seldom been questioned; nevertheless, critics have often discussed Tristan und Isolde as though the drama, in itself, is of no great significance, a sublimation of the composer’s love for Mathilde Wesendonck, or a wistful romantic dream. In this work I attempt to show that the real drama takes place in the music, and that it has a profound religious meaning, as relevant to us who live in a pro- fane and secular age as it was to Wagner’s contemporaries. I acknowledge a debt to Ernst Kurth and Alfred Lorenz, whose early studies of Wagner’s harmony and formal organization have gradually won for themselves an honorable place in musicological thinking. I have learned much from the musicological writings of Robert Bailey, Carolyn Abbate, and Carl Dahlhaus; much from the anthropological writings of René Girard, Walter Burkert, and Emile Durkheim; and much from the philosophical writings of Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, and Nietzsche, all three of whom had a special significance for Wagner. I am especially in- debted to Michael Tanner, whose chapter on Tristan und Isolde in his book Wagner sparked off the train of thought that led to this book. My greatest debt, however, is to Immanuel Kant, the dry old sage of Königsberg, for whom neither music nor the erotic had any evident ap- Scruton.00 FM 9/29/03 11:11 AM Page vi peal, but who was nevertheless the ultimate inspiration behind the view of human nature that is expressed and vindicated in Wagner’s operas, and which finds its most surprising and moving elaboration in the tale of Tris- tan and Isolde. While this book is a guide to Wagner’s music drama, there- fore, it can also be read in another way as a case study in the Kantian phi- losophy of man. Previous versions of this book were read by David Matthews, Anthony O’Hear, Bob Grant, David Wiggins, Michael Markham, Michael Tanner, and Robin Holloway: their comments saved me from many errors and stimulated me to think further about the argument. I am particularly grateful to the Nexus Institute at Tilburg University, and to Rob Riemen, its director, for inviting me to a stimulating conference on love and death, and compelling me to put on paper some of the thoughts about Tristan und Isolde that are contained in this book. Malmesbury vi Scruton.00 FM 9/29/03 11:11 AM Page vii Wagner and Religion The Story of Tristan Wagner’s Treatment of the Story The Music of Tristan The Philosophy of Love Tragedy and Sacrifice Love, Death, and Redemption From Romance to Ritual Table of Motives This page intentionally left blank Scruton.00 FM 9/29/03 11:11 AM Page 1 - This page intentionally left blank Scruton.01 9/24/03 9:46 PM Page 3 Wagner and Religion Wagner was an artist with an agenda, and this agenda was nothing less than the redemption of humankind. At one stage in his life Wagner wanted to redeem the world through revolutionary politics, of the romantic and utopian kind that inspired so many of the intellectual supporters of the 88 revolutions. Later he came to accept that the yearning for redemp- tion is a religious yearning, that it cannot be fulfilled by politics, and that it demands an act of otherworldly renunciation. But Wagner’s religious faith was shaky at best and scarcely contained within the bounds of or- thodox Christianity. So he set out to discover a redemption that needs no God to accomplish it. In pursuing this idea Wagner could fairly be described as one of the great humanists of modern times. But he was a humanist of a peculiar kind, who recognized humanity’s religious need and tried to make man his own redeemer, so as to ennoble the human beyond the divine. This at- tempt compelled him toward idealism and pessimism in equal measure— idealism about our nature, pessimism about our lot. In this book I explore one of Wagner’s majestic attempts to articulate the idea of redemption in artistic and dramatic form. And I shall examine the origin of all such ideals in the peculiar metaphysical predicament of human beings when they come face to face with their incarnation and know themselves simulta- neously as both determined and free. Like many of his contemporaries, Wagner believed that the society into which he was born was morally and spiritually degenerate. High ideals had once animated the German people; noble thoughts and noble Scruton.01 9/24/03 9:46 PM Page 4 deeds had thrived on German soil. Since those times, however, luxury, ef- feminacy, and materialism had ruined the soul, and the truly human— the thing which invites redemption and which may also achieve it—had become hidden in the clouds of appetite. Such, in broadest outline, was Wagner’s vision; and it naturally invites the question: when was it other- wise? When, and how, did those noble thoughts and deeds make them- selves known? Wagner was too serious a thinker to respond with dates, places, and persons. Instead, he applied himself to the study of the surviving litera- ture of the early Germanic tribes, and to the poetry of medieval Ger- many. His purpose was not to identify exemplary people and historical events but to acquaint himself with a culture in which the real had been penetrated through and through by the ideal: a culture in which people did not merely do things but also lived up to things. Thereby he discov- ered myth—not as a collection of fables and beliefs, nor as a primitive re- ligion, but as a distinct category of human thought, as open to us, Wag- ner thought, in a world of scientific skepticism as it had been open to the inhabitants of ancient Greece or Iceland. Myth dawned on Wagner as a form of social hope. It was a way of thinking that could restore to moder- nity the lost sense of the ideal, without which human life is worthless. Wagner’s discovery of myth is not merely a matter of one person’s moral and artistic credo. It is also one of the great intellectual advances of modern times, the ancestor and inspiration of comparative anthropology, symbolist poetry, psychoanalysis, and many aesthetic and theological doc- trines that are now common currency. Wagner is given credit for this by Claude Lévi-Strauss (who acknowledges the composer as the main in- spiration behind his “structuralist” method),1 by the anthropologist and medievalist Jessie L. Weston, and by Weston’s disciple, T. S. Eliot, in The Waste Land. The idea of myth as a dramatization of deep and hidden truths about the human psyche entered common currency with Freud’s theory of the unconscious. Freud identified our “complexes” through the myths of Greek tragedy and argued that these myths encapsulate the uni- versal psychic residues of our sexual development. Freud’s pupil C. G. Jung gave an even more prominent role to myth, which he saw as the out- growth of collective emotion and religious need, and the archetypal form - Scruton.01 9/24/03 9:46 PM Page 5 of human thinking. Not surprisingly, Wagner’s own works have lent them- selves to extensive and often illuminating analysis from both Freudian and Jungian perspectives. However, the accumulation of myth-analyzing, myth- dramatizing, and myth-making that has ensued in the wake of Wagner has made it all the more necessary for us to revisit Wagner’s own ap- proach and to study the freshness and vitality with which he transformed ancient myth and legend into quintessentially modern art. A myth, for Wagner, is not a fable or a religious doctrine but a vehicle for human knowledge. The myth acquaints us with ourselves and our condition, using symbols and characters that give objective form to our inner compulsions.