125-Anniversary Lecture by Professor Roger Scruton
January 2009
'Understanding Wagner's Ring: The Composer
as Philosopher'
Professor Roger Scruton, School of Music
Tuesday 3 February 2009, 16.30
The School of Music is delighted to announce that, as part of Cardiff University's 125 Anniversary, Professor Roger Scruton will visit the School on 3 February 2009 to give a Public Lecture.
His topic will be 'Understanding Wagner's Ring: The Composer as Philosopher':
"Wagner was a poet, critic and dramatist as well as a composer and aimed at an unprecedented synthesis between drama and music, which was to be 'the artwork of the future'. He was also a philosopher - that is to say, someone who thought hard and long about abstract and foundational questions. He sought to understand the nature of modernity and the new relation between man and God that has emerged since the Enlightenment. He believed that human life would be worthless if we could not recapture the experience of redemption, and that it is the business of art to provide that experience. These and other ideas continue to fascinate both his critics and his disciples, and I try to show how they are embodied in The Ring cycle, and what we can learn from their musical realisation."
Roger Scruton is a writer, philosopher and public commentator who specialises in aesthetics, with particular attention to music and architecture. He engages in contemporary political and cultural debates from the standpoint of a conservative thinker and is well-known as a powerful polemicist. His many books on music include The Aesthetics of Music (OUP, 1999), Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred in Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde' (OUP, 2003) and an analysis of the musical and spiritual meaning in Wagner's music, News from Somewhere: On Settling (Continuum, 2003). He is also a composer of two operas: The Minister and Violet. He is currently Research Professor at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, teaching philosophy at their graduate school in Washington.
For a short report on Professor Scruton's lecture, please
follow this link.