Sir Roger Scruton’s Wagner

“Scruton loved Wagner. The two were a match made in heaven, or hell, depending on your perspective and appreciation of irony.”

“Wagner was an artist with an agenda, and this agenda was nothing less than the redemption of humankind,” writes Sir Roger Scruton. I consider it a great blessing of my life that I had the opportunity to study with Scruton at the University of Buckingham just prior to his death. I entered my studies intending to write on musical aesthetics, Schubert, to be specific, but instead ended up writing on the political aesthetics of Edmund Burke. There was still an aesthetic connection to the switch. Despite Scruton’s public reputation as a political theorist of conservatism, his grander works—and the works so lauded and loved by his many students—were on art, aesthetics, and music, and he openly said his greatest loves were art, music, and literature.

Wagner’s Heart

Scruton loved Wagner. The two were a match made in heaven, or hell, depending on your perspective and appreciation of irony. Before his death, Scruton was working on a manuscript on Wagner’s Parsifal. It was published in the summer of 2020 and completed a de facto trilogy of Wagner’s great works by the eminent bard of aesthetics: Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, and Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption. In examining Wagner through the eyes of Scruton, we must ask ourselves: Is there a link between Wagner’s great operas and, if so, what is the message that has been lost in the politicization and bastardization of Wagner’s artistic agenda?

We all know the familiar story of Richard Wagner. Among artists, especially in music, Wagner was an avid reader of philosophy. Young Wagner read Hegel and Feuerbach, an older Wagner developed a mentoring friendship with a young Friedrich Nietzsche before their falling out, and the late Wagner would fall in love with his philosophical soulmate Arthur Schopenhauer. While there is no hard evidence that the composer of romantic mythology read Marx, many are tempted to see—especially the Prologue of The Ring cycle—as echoing Marxist sentiments concerning socioeconomics and the nature of capitalism through the depiction of Nibelheim. The philosophical story of Wagner is one in which Hegel, Feuerbach, and Schopenhauer (and probably Marx) careen through the Wagnerian dramas in their own various ways leaving their imprint on his magnificent works for those with eyes to see and ears to hear to tease out.

This story of a philosophical Wagner is one that Scruton also sought to tell, but he differed from the post-Shaw and post-Freudian and Jungian analyses of Wagner in a significant way. The philosopher who unlocks the mysterious dramas of Wagner is none of the above. Instead, it is the philosopher whose shadow looms large over the long 19th century: Immanuel Kant.