Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde

by Roger Scruton

A tale of forbidden love and inevitable death, the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde recounts the story of two lovers unknowingly drinking a magic potion and ultimately dying in one another's arms. While critics have lauded Wagner's Tristan and Isolde for the originality and subtlety of the music, they have denounced the drama as a "mere trifle"--a rendering of Wagner's forbidden love for Matilde Wesendonck, the wife of a banker who supported him during his exile in Switzerland.

Death-Devoted Heart explodes this established interpretation, proving the drama to be more than just a sublimation of the composer's love for Wesendonck or a wistful romantic dream. Scruton boldly attests that Tristan and Isolde has profound religious meaning and remains as relevant today as it was to Wagner's contemporaries. He also offers keen insight into the nature of erotic love, the sacred qualities of human passion, and the peculiar place of the erotic in our culture. His argument touches on the nature of tragedy, the significance of ritual sacrifice, and the meaning of redemption, providing a fresh interpretation of Wagner's masterpiece. Roger Scruton has written an original and provocative account of Wagner's music drama, which blends philosophy, criticism, and musicology in order to show the work's importance in the twenty-first century.

Genres: Philosophy, Music, Nonfiction, Cultural, Unfinished

248 pages, Hardcover

First published November 20, 2003

About the author

Sir Roger Scruton was a writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. He was a fellow of the British Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He taught in both England and America and was a Visiting Professor at Department of Philosophy and Fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, he was also a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington D.C.

In 2015 he published two books, The Disappeared and later in the autumn, Fools Frauds and Firebrands. Fools Frauds and Firebrands is an update of Thinkers of the New Left published, to widespread outrage, in 1986. It includes new chapters covering Lacan, Deleuze and Badiou and some timely thoughts about the historians and social thinkers who led British intellectuals up the garden path during the last decades, including Eric Hobsbawm and Ralph Miliband.

In 2016 he again published two books, Confessions of A Heretic (a collection of essays) and The Ring of Truth, about Wagner’s Ring cycle, which was widely and favourably reviewed. In 2017 he published On Human Nature (Princeton University Press), which was again widely reviewed, and contains a distillation of his philosophy. He also published a response to Brexit, Where We Are (Bloomsbury).

Reviews

[Cristian Rodriguez · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliantly written exploration of the depths of Wagnerian thinking and composing. Scruton smoothly navigates between musicology, intellectual history and philosophy of sexuality and love. Although the undisputed subject of the book is Wagner, it can be read as an original essay conveying Scruton’s own philosophical and aesthetic insights.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very stimulating book, a pleasure to read. Scruton is enormously erudite as well as musically insightful. He builds an argument around Tristan, involving Wagner creating a new type of art which takes the space which religion one filled. There's quite a lot of philosophising around the nature and use of erotic desire, which is challenging and compelling (even if he gets a bit overly feverish when writing about the demerits of pornography). It's not the definitive statement on Wagner's Tristan and Isolde - that is the opera itself - but does deepen and widen one's appreciation of the work and the achievement of its maestro.

[Brian Watson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would give this 4.5 starts if that were an option. The first four chapters were five-star material, while the last three got further away from the focus of the book, which is Richard Wagner's opera, Tristan und Isolde.

Few people could pull off this book, which discusses the drama, the music, and the philosophy of Wagner's great opera. I have seen the opera twice live in the past, yet I gained a greater understanding and appreciation of it by reading this book. Wagner's opera is a tale of two star-crossed lovers whose love is impossible in this world. Therefore, they must unite in death. The music of the opera reflects this: its final resolution arrives only at the end, after four hours of tonal ambiguity and frustrated cadences.

Scruton, a philosopher and composer, is able to address both the philosophical and musical issues equally well. He clearly loves the opera. My only complaint is that he isn't critical enough of Wagner's strange philosophy, which is that salvation can be achieved through erotic love that is only consummated in death. Scruton claims that Tristan's death parallels Jesus' death. There might be some truth to this. But Jesus' death accomplished something: he bore the wrath of God for those united to him by faith. What did Tristan's death do? It's not clear that Wagner envisioned any kind of afterlife. Tristan's death (and Isolde's) is a tragedy because it could have been avoided.

So, interesting reading, particularly the first four chapters, and a must-read for anyone desiring to understand Wagner's Meisterwerk.

[Brett Linsley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Typically dense Scruton - as rewarding as the amount of work you want to put into understanding. I’m not sure I’m convinced in the argument that Wagner actually intended Tristan to be a staged ritual/sacrament, but it is fascinating and elevates one’s appreciation and enjoyment of the work. My favorite part is actually the epilogue in which he suggests the ritual component of the work - a work that presaged the emergence of musical/literary/artistic modernism - was something that created and took full form in modernism. I had always struggled to out my finger on my love for modernist art given my “old at heart” tendencies - this gave me an explanation and I will forever be grateful.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book and there were parts that captivated me. There were also, however, parts where I thought the author had submerged himself in gratuitous self-expression of his own intellectual brilliance. That's my way of saying that there were parts that I did not understand, and wasn't sufficiently motivated to try and understand. My sacrificial act in finishing the book based on my desire to appreciate Tristan und Isolde in a deeper way, coupled with my avid listening of the opera, mercifully redeemed me.

[K.A. Meade · Rating 5 out of 5]

The joy of this book is not simply that it is so well written and the style so lucid, but also that it was written at all.
To write what is at heart a dissertation on moral philosophy and weave it around a musicological deconstruction of Wagner's opera is utterly enchanting. This guy is a genuine National Treasure, regardless of whether or not you agree with a word he writes or not.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a wonderful book that I read last year and am surprised I didn't add it to goodreads (which I really only have time to update over the summer).

[Dominic Aquila · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best analysis of the theme of erotic love in Tristan und Isolde