Unlike many opera fans, I wasn’t raised on it—our household mainly resounded with ’80s New Wave. No, I got to know opera when I was a college sophomore: My head was filled at that time with the gloomy philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, and I knew he had influenced a German composer, Richard Wagner.
Curious how a volume of metaphysics could possibly be transmuted into music, I decided to give Wagner’s operas a try.
The best place to start on this novel artform, it seemed to me, was with the entire seven-disk recording of the 1990 Metropolitan Opera production of the Ring cycle. I checked the box set out from our library and, along with an extremely reluctant friend, planned to watch all 15 hours of it over a weekend.
Predictably, we didn’t finish the apocalyptic conclusion, called Götterdämmerung, until nearly two months later. But from that point on I was converted—which is to say it was as a devout Wagnerite that I came to appreciate opera. This places me diametrically apart from the author of a new book on the topic, The Republic of Love.
It’s written by Martha Nussbaum, the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago.* Accordingly, she also brings to the theater a philosophic lens. But rather than Wagner’s heavy, moody romanticism, she favors the ebullience of Mozart. This isn’t merely a matter of musical preference: Mozart, she reminds us, was not just a composer, but also an active freemason and man of the Enlightenment.
“The deepest philosopher of the Enlightenment,” in fact. Nussbaum believes in the old conceit that a republic depends on the virtue of its citizens; what has held us back, these three centuries on, from realizing the full Enlightenment hope—the hope of a society built on liberty, equality, and fraternity—is our insufficient formation as individuals.
And opera, Nussbaum dares to suggest, can help form us into the new, more virtuous citizenry that society needs. After all, while Rousseau, Kant, and their fellow scribblers can teach the head, through music Mozart and his confreres are able to teach the heart. Per Nussbaum, in Mozart’s works we can find “The idea of a kind of internal freedom, a freedom of the spirit that consists precisely in not caring about hierarchy, neither seeking to avoid being controlled by others nor seeking to control them.”
This is heady stuff. But the book grounds these claims with such a rigorous series of close readings and close listenings that it’s hard not to come away convinced.
Nussbaum starts with The Marriage of Figaro, passes through the rest of Mozart’s oeuvre, and then follows a similar Enlightenment sentiment through the rest of the operatic tradition down to the modern day. This first chapter on Figaro anchors the rest, giving a clear explanation of the political virtue Nussbaum thinks we can learn from Mozart. So, what does this Mozartian virtue look like?
Not like the villainous aristocrat Count Almaviva, caught in the feudal net of honor and revenge. But neither does it look like his wily servant, the opera’s protagonist Figaro; Nussbaum points out that, although the plot turns on the two men’s competition over Figaro’s fiancée Susanna, neither of their arias focuses on the purported object of affection. Instead, they obsessively sing over and over about how much they want to humiliate their male rival. It turns out Figaro is just as trapped as the count by their society’s misguided values.
Surprisingly, the model of Mozart’s new citizen is a side character: the page Cherubino. Cherubino, a mezzo-soprano, is a pretty boy who spends his time pining after girls and writing love poems. He has no interest in the status games that preoccupy the other men of the opera, and even less in military exploits (as we learn when, much to his terror, the count tries to draft him); he just wants to form happy relationships of love and pleasure.
This, then, is the Mozartian moral program that Nussbaum admires: a kind of playful, republican hedonism. It’s a cheerful, world-affirming vision. It includes lofty ideals of universal love and freedom, but despite their loftiness, these “are not to be attained by exiting from the real world into a pristine world, but rather by pursuing them in this one, in episodes of love and craziness.”
The great composers and librettists after Mozart—Giuseppe Verdi in particular—she sees as continuing in this project with one prominent exception, which brings us back to Wagner.
To Nussbaum, Wagner is practically the devil. Whereas Mozart focuses on the real world, Wagner turns away to otherworldly ideals. Mozart is playful, Wagner is serious to the point of pomposity. Mozart embraces the pleasures of the body, Wagner (sometimes) denies them. Mozart delights in plurality, Wagner wants uniformity And, while Wagner is disgusted by society’s imperfection, Mozart can have a good-hearted laugh at it.
All of the above is undeniable; Wagner is full of the same pessimistic world-weariness that he read in the books of Schopenhauer. But does that make him an enemy of freedom?
I don’t think so. From the first time I encountered his music, blaring fuzzily from the speakers of our dorm TV, I heard a promise of liberation. Wagner’s art points to a peace found by turning away from the world, from desire, from competition. In his Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which Nussbaum covers in her penultimate chapter, these ideals are exemplified by the character of Hans Sachs. After flipping through a book of history and realizing the world is vanity and suffering, he resigns his own, equally vain desires. Now looking at the whole picture with a new impartial clarity, he can act out of compassion alone.
A few scenes later he voluntarily removes himself from the opera’s love triangle, so that the young Walther and Eva can be happy together. Isn’t this the same internal freedom Nussbaum finds in Mozart, “neither seeking to avoid being controlled by others nor seeking to control them?”
Sunny hedonism and dusky renunciation, it seems to me, are opposing methods aimed at quite similar ends. Both whisper that, if we can just clarify our manner of life, overcome irrationality, shame, and convention, we could achieve a more blissful existence. And the private happiness we find will also be a public happiness, since once we stop grasping at others as tools for our gratification, we can finally enter into authentic, loving, reciprocal human relationships, whether this looks like spiritual friendship or free love.
One can weigh the merits of these two approaches. But I’m not sure the dispute between Mozart and Wagner, between world-affirming and world-rejecting philosophies, can really be resolved. Which of the two you are drawn to comes down, at the end of the day, to psychological makeup. We’re all born under different stars and grow up under different circumstances, and some turn out jovial, some saturnine.
And anyway, Nussbaum’s book is at its core concerned not with inner, but with political freedom, and it’s on political grounds that she most vehemently objects to Wagnerism and Schopenhauerism. Politics, she says, is inevitably messy and compromised. A mystical orientation only content with perfection will inevitably be disappointed. The result is often cynicism, often a quietist withdrawal. Both seem to Nussbaum a dereliction of our communal responsibilities.
But the third possible response is even worse. When the monistic personality does turn to politics, it seeks to produce a uniform, closed community; to make society into a sort of pruned convent garden in which it can find rest. Wagner announces such a project at the finale of Die Meistersinger: the revitalization of the world through “Holy German Art.”
The menace of nationalism shadows this phrase, and it can’t be totally dismissed as a harmless call for a new aesthetic project. Or rather, nationalism is an aesthetic project, one which takes a whole polity as its canvas. It’s concerned with the sensible, visible features of a community and its inhabitants—hence the 19th century obsession with dress and architecture and language and folk music—and seeks to arrange them, like a work of art, into a unified, purposeful whole. We’ve since seen the political dangers of this. Wagner’s repugnant antisemitism is not incidental to the rest of his thought and sensibility.
The political manifestation of the Mozartian attitude, which embraces plurality and contingency, is undeniably more palatable. In Nussbaum’s presentation, it comes across as a sort of 1960s-flavored liberalism. This ethos has its own political problems, of course: It’s rather hard to imagine a movement of Cherubinos achieving much of anything, much less establishing a new political order. But placed next to the darkest permutations of Wagnerism, fecklessness hardly seems like a vice.
Nussbaum spends the later chapters of the book exploring how later operas from Fidelio to Nixon in China wrestle with a harsher world than the one Mozart, living in the roseate glow of Enlightenment rationalism, had imagined. But I’ll leave you to read the book yourself—even with my contrary temperament and taste, I earnestly recommend it. It’s always refreshing to see a critical intellect at work not just on questions of art, but all the intertwined problems of politics and virtue.
Correction, April 25, 2026: This article has been updated to correct the current title of Martha C. Nussbaum.
