On December 3, 2019, Viktor Orban presented the Hungarian Order of Merit to Roger Scruton in London. Scruton would die five weeks later from lung cancer.
In his speech honoring Scruton, Orban praised him for his work in the 1980s aiding the anti-communist underground in Central and Eastern Europe, which included Hungary. Orban concluded the speech by saying: "He was and is a loyal friend of the freedom-loving Hungarians, who knows that this freedom relies on nation states and Christian civilization."
To identify Scruton as a supporter of "Christian civilization" is disturbing to those of us who have argued that Scruton belonged to a Kantian conservative tradition of atheistic religiosity. Atheistic religiosity is for those who want the "magic of religious feeling" as an expression of the human mind's "religious instinct," but without having to believe in the real existence of God independent of the human mind. They don't believe in the literal truth of Christianity or any other religion. And yet they want to have a sense of the sacred that comes from religious emotions, but without the need to believe any religious doctrines. They believe that God is dead, but they also believe that human beings need to satisfy their religious longings for transcendence and redemption if they are to escape the nihilism that comes from the death of God.
I suspect that many, if not most, of the conservatives who promote "Christian civilization"--including Orban--are really Christian atheists who believe a Christian culture supports the moral and political order of a nation, but without believing in the truth of Christian doctrines. The flimsiness of this fake Christianity explains why Orban's promotion of Hungary as a Christian nation has failed to stop the decline of Christianity in Hungary.
I have been prompted to think more about this while reading Scruton's interpretation of Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in Death Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's Tristan and Isolde (Oxford University Press, 2004). I have been doing this in preparation for attending a concert performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra that includes the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde along with Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs.
REDEMPTION IN TRISTAN AND ISOLDE
Let's start with a brief synopsis of the story as Wagner tells it.
Set in the Celtic Middle Ages, the opera begins with Tristan, a knight of Cornwall, escorting Isolde, the daughter of the King of Ireland, to Cornwall where she is to marry King Marke, Tristan's uncle. During the journey, Isolde is filled with rage and resentment towards Tristan for killing her fiancé, Morold, in battle. Despite her anger, when Tristan stares into her eyes--which is marked musically by Wagner's "Look" motive--she is drawn to him, and their complex relationship unfolds throughout the opera.
Act 1. Isolde, furious at her fate, wishes for revenge against Tristan. She recalls how she had speared his life when he was wounded and disguised as Tantris. As they approach Cornwall, she demands that Tristan drink a cup of atonement with her. However, Brangane, Isolde's maid, secretly substitutes the poison with a love potion, causing both Tristan and Isolde to fall deeply in love with one another.
Act 2. The love between Tristan and Isolde deepens, but they are caught in a web of duty and betrayal. Tristan is torn between his loyalty to King Marke and his love for Isolde. Their secret affair is discovered, leading to a confrontation that highlights the tragic nature of their love. The act culminates in a passionate duet where they express their longing and despair.
Act 3. The final act sees Tristan wounded in battle and longing for Isolde. He dies in her arms, and Isolde, overwhelmed by grief, follows him into death. The opera concludes with Isolde's poignant Liebestod (love-death) where she transcends the physical world, symbolizing the idea that true love can only be fully realized in death.
I will pass over the details of Scruton's meticulous interpretation of this opera and jump to his conclusions.
Scruton argued that Wagner's agenda as an artist was "nothing less than the redemption of humankind," which he accomplished in Tristan and Isolde. According to Scruton, Wagner saw that the yearning for redemption was a religious yearning, an expression of the religious instinct that is universal to human beings, and that it could be fulfilled only in "otherworldly renunciation." But Wagner "set out to discover a redemption that needs no god to accomplish it," because he would "make man his own redeemer" (3). He would show "what redemption could mean, when detached from every promise of a life after death" (14).
Wagner himself once described Tristan and Isolde as a story of "endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power, fame, honor, chivalry, loyalty, and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial dream; one thing alone left living--longing, longing unquenchable, a yearning, a hunger, a languishing forever renewing itself; one sole redemption--death, surcease, a sleep without awakening" (29).
Thus could Wagner's opera stir religious feelings of redemption in his audience without requiring any belief in religious doctrines (like the existence of God and the eternal afterlife). In this way, Scruton insisted, Wagner proved "that religion could live again in art and did not need God for its survival," and "that man can become holy to himself with no help from the gods" (190, 196).
But I would say that at best what Wagner proved is that his operatic art could induce a fake emotion of religious redemption that could not really redeem human beings. After all, how can human beings be redeemed through "otherworldly renunciation" if they believe that there is no "otherworld" beyond this world?
THREE POSITIONS ON REDEMPTION
The fake redemption of atheistic religiosity is only one of at least three possible positions that musical artists can take on redemption.
A second position is the real redemption that can come through a musical composition like Bach's Saint Matthew's Passion or Handel's Messiah, which induce religious emotions of redemption but also teach religious doctrines of redemption by eternal salvation. The members of the audience who are not Christian believers can feel the power of those religious emotions. But the Christian believers in the audience can also understand the promise of their redemption because they know that their Redeemer really exists, and He will raise them from the dead to eternal life in Heaven.
A third position that a musical artist can take on redemption is that there is no need for redemption from life because life--even with its suffering, vulnerability, and mortality--is inherently good. And for that reason, we can calmly accept the end of life in death as the completion of our life's journey. That position is artistically conveyed in Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs.
In 1948, Strauss was 84 and composing his last music before his death the next year. His Four Last Songs were for soprano and orchestra. He wrote to Kirsten Flagstad to express his wish that she would be the soprano for the world premiere of these songs. And indeed the premiere occurred in London in 1950, after his death, sung by Flagstad with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Furtwangler. (Remarkably, Flagstad had sang as Isolde at Covenant Garden, London, in 1936.)
As he composed this music for a soprano, Strauss probably heard the voice of his wife Pauline de Anha, who had sung as a professional soprano.
The lyrics for the four songs are poems. The first three by Herman Hesse, the fourth by Joseph Eichendorff.
In the first, Fruhling ("Spring"), the soprano's voice rises up as she dreams of trees and sky, and the flute evokes birdsong.
In the second, "September," there is an allegorical passage from life to death. The first stanza reads:
The garden is mourning,
the rain sinks coolly into the flowers.
Summer shudders
as it meets its end.
It ends with Summer closing "its large eyes grown weary."
In the third song, Beim Schlafengehen ("While going to sleep"), the soprano yearns to forget all thoughts in sleep. The first stanza reads:
Now that the day has made me so tired,
my dearest longings shall
be accepted kindly by the starry night
like a weary child.
In the final song, Im Abendrot ("In the twilight"), we hear about an old couple at the end of life. It begins with an orchestral depiction of sunset, with two trilling flutes representing a pair of larks ascending into the sky (the souls of the old couple). We can imagine that here Strauss was thinking of his long and happy marriage with Pauline de Anha, who would die in 1950 only eight months after his death. Here in this song, they are contemplating the end of life together.
The light fades as the song unfolds, and then the soprano asks, in the last line, Ist dies etwa Tod? ("Is this perhaps death?")
The orchestra then whispers the "transfiguration" theme from Strauss's Death and Transfiguration, which he had written 60 years before. Strauss is saying goodbye by wistfully suggesting that he has come full circle from his early life to his end.
Although "transfiguration" might suggest the need for redemption, the tone and meaning of Strauss's Four Last Songs are very different from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Strauss's songs convey not an unquenchable longing for redemption from life (like that of Tristan and Isolde) but a serene completion of life in the old couple's calm acceptance of their inevitable ending of their lives together: "Is this perhaps death?"
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