Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.(Book Review)

Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. By Roger Scruton Oxford Univ. Press, 2004 238 pp.

If you're going to disagree with Nietzsche, Plato and Schopenhauer, you'd best have your own house in order. Roger Scruton certainly does. It is difficult, maybe impossible, to add much to the literature on Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. But, as we learn from many of Wagner's own characters, much of the importance of a tale lies in the way it is told. For Scruton, Tristan ties up many of the great themes. It's about redemption, but it is "an inner redemption achieved by the human subject alone." This redemption is purely human, needing no God in it, though Wagner was seeking "to reattach the symbols of religion to their undying meaning," ultimately regaining what is truly sacred. The sacred is built, simply, out of desire, and the redemption is not from death but in death. Above all, for Scruton, Tristan and Isolde's sacrifice restores for us the belief in human potential, which renews in us nothing less than the will to live.

We also get a discussion of Greek theater and the need for death and destruction (though Scruton does not believe Tristan to be a tragedy) and another of myth ("the ideal, without which human life is worthless"). The greatest strength of the book is the chapter on the philosophy of love, which takes us from the ...