Thoughts from a Life: Opera as an Art
by David Matthews
Music was an essential part of Roger Scruton’s life. He learned the piano as a boy, and as an adult acquired the profound technical knowledge that enabled him to write The Aesthetics of Music, widely recognized as the most important book in its field. He also wrote two books of essays on music, and three magisterial books on Wagner – Death Devoted Heart (on Tristan und Isolde), The Ring of Truth, and his final book, Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption. He taught himself to compose (with a little help from me) and wrote two operas, The Minister (1998) and Violet (2005), both of which were staged and which, as I experienced myself, are musically and dramatically effective. Composing for him was a sideline, although if he had not decided to pursue just about everything else, Roger might have become an important contributor to the music of our time.
In 2018 Roger devised a libretto for me to set to music, something we had planned for many years. It was originally called An Angel Passes and is now renamed Anna after its heroine. It is a tragic love story set in a Central European country at the time of the 1989 revolutions – probably Czechoslovakia, which we both knew well. Roger’s libretto is superbly dramatic. I sent him the vocal score of the first act shortly before he died and he was able to read it through. Anna is now almost complete and of course it is very sad that Roger will never be able to hear it.
Roger loved opera, and among his favourite opera composers were Mozart and Janáček. But above all, Roger thought that Wagner had the most to say to us today. He several times quoted Wagner’s famous statement: “It is reserved to art to salvage the kernel of religion, inasmuch as the mythical images that religion would wish to be believed as true are apprehended in art for their symbolic value, and through ideal representation of those symbols art reveals the concealed deep truth within them.” In The Ring of Truth he wrote that Wagner’s world “is a world full of meaning, and we understand this because we are presented with those sacred moments in which human beings and their emotions transcend the world of calculation to become exemplary and pure…The awe that we feel at the great moments of sacrifice and resolution in the Ring cycle is proof enough that we are by nature turned towards the sacred. And it is our openness to these moments that enables us to come away from the Cycle with a sense of profound spiritual comfort, knowing that life in this world is worthwhile.”
In writing of the immense seriousness of Wagner’s art, Roger was emphasizing his opposition to what he called “the culture of repudiation’, the desire of many influential people in the arts world today to undermine our high culture. He wrote often, in particular in his essay ‘The Assault on Opera’ in Music as an Art, of the attempts of many contemporary producers to trivialize the operas they produce, Wagner in particular. He was angered by their hostile attitude towards the opera public who go to see a favourite opera and find it has been sabotaged. I can only hope that future producers will read Roger’s writings on opera and learn from them a respect for composers and what they are saying both in their libretti and in their music.
David Matthews is an English composer and leading symphonist, and has served as the Music Advisor to the English Chamber Orchestra since 1998.