The Republic of Love - An Interview with Prof. Martha Nussbaum on Political Thought in Opera

Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, is one of the leading political philosophers of our time. She began her academic career at New York University and Harvard – where she completed her doctorate – and subsequently taught at leading institutions worldwide, including Harvard, Brown, and Oxford. Over the years, she has authored more than two dozen books, one of the most prominent being her seminal 1986 work, The Fragility of Goodness. Among PPE students, she is known primarily for her joint work with Amartya Sen on the "Capabilities Approach," a body of work that has had a profound influence on research and policymaking in the fields of welfare and development economics. However, her broad influence extends far beyond political economy: throughout a long and prolific career, Nussbaum has authored numerous books and articles across diverse fields such as Hellenistic philosophy, ethics, feminism, law and literature. Nussbaum's philosophy seeks, among other things, to explore the role of human emotions in political and normative spheres. Her extensive contributions have earned her widespread international recognition, including the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy (2016), the Berggruen Prize (2018), and the Holberg Prize (2021).

In her 2018 book, The Monarchy of Fear,[1] Nussbaum examines the contemporary political climate through the lens of its dominant emotions: anxiety, fear, withdrawal, and avoidance. Where can a remedy for the emotional ailments of society be found? Nussbaum points toward the arts, and especially toward the powerful artistic medium of opera.

Henoch Yaakov Jehuda \ Second-year PPE student, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Noa Yovel \ Second-year PPE and "Amirim" Honors Program student, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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Opera offers an intensive combination of theater, music, and singing, a combination that engages both emotion and thought, enabling deep understanding of political, social, and psychological climates. In her new book, The Republic of Love,[2] Nussbaum seeks to find an antidote to the pessimistic reflections of The Monarchy of Fear. The first part of the book presents an analysis of the works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), whose compositions left an indelible mark on the world of music and express layers of political thought in which she identifies a political, social, and human vision that may serve as a foundation for a sustainable liberal democracy.

Mozart was an active member of the Freemason movement – A socio-philosophical order that emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment, working to promote ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity outside traditional frameworks of the Church and the monarchy. He joined an egalitarian Viennese lodge that refused to admit aristocrats and brought together members of the bourgeoisie and the working class. Elements of the movement's intellectual climate and the spirit of the Enlightenment penetrated deeply into his works. Nussbaum shows that even when Mozart composed a libretto - the verbal and narrative text of an opera - which was often written by others in a cynical or conservative spirit, his music breathed new life into those texts. The music in his works expresses a liberal, egalitarian, and inclusive vision that demonstrates compassion for the diversity and madness of human experience. In his casting choices, Mozart employs "trouser roles," women portraying men, such as Cherubino, in order to challenge rigid gender conventions and to introduce audiences to emotional norms of reciprocity and vulnerability.

Nussbaum's book offers a survey and analysis of composers and playwrights who, in different ways, continued Mozart's intellectual legacy, ranging from Ludwig van Beethoven and Giuseppe Verdi to contemporary creators such as Benjamin Britten, Jake Heggie, and John Adams, whose operas express a vision of political, social, and emotional freedom in the face of a complex reality. Among the works analyzed in the book are Verdi's Don Carlos, which presents the fear of religious tyranny; Britten's Peter Grimes and Albert Herring, which examine the cruelty of the crowd and the overcoming of homophobia; Heggie's Dead Man Walking, which addresses the rigidity of the modern legal system and the death penalty; and Adams's Nixon in China, which demonstrates how achievements such as world peace are often attained precisely by flawed leaders and do not depend on morally perfect actors.

As an antithesis to the free spirited and tolerant outlook of Mozart and his successors, Nussbaum analyzes the philosophical influences on the works of the composer and thinker Richard Wagner (1813–1883), a central figure in the nationalist and antisemitic circles of nineteenth century Germany, who was deeply influenced by the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer, the view according to which a blind metaphysical drive, the "Will," renders human happiness an unattainable achievement. Nussbaum argues that even Wagner's seemingly comic and cheerful works, such as Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg), are infused with emotions and messages that promote a closed, authoritarian, tribal, and entirely homogeneous society, one that presents conformity and the exclusion of outsiders as remedies for that existential despair.

In a conversation with Itutim, Professor Nussbaum expands on the complex relationship between rationality and emotion, on the power of music to transcend political boundaries, and on the way her own musical experience as a soprano singer has shaped her philosophical understanding of these issues.

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The title of your most recent book, The Republic of Love, is described as an "antidote" to the rather grim reflections on the current political situation in your 2018 book, The Monarchy of Fear. What are some of the themes from that work for which opera may provide us with an alternative?

The theme of authoritarian rule inspiring fear is very much present in the new book, in Mozart’s depiction of this fear being overcome by an equal and reciprocal love – particularly in Idomeneo. But later composers, less optimistic than Mozart and living in societies where fear has not been banished, return to the topic with deepened insight. Verdi’s Don Carlos shows how religious fear preys on people’s guilt feelings and insecurities and, more generally, how crowds are volatile and inconstant, heeding the call to vengeance on the Church’s enemies. The love of liberty is the great antidote to that fear, but will it win? Verdi’s beautiful portrayal makes its attractiveness compelling even if in the opera it is defeated.

The viciousness of the crowd is also the great theme of Britten’s Peter Grimes (1945), a stark and chilling work which leaves us with no sense of hope for the oppressed. However, elsewhere, before and after Grimes, Britten leaves us with lots of hope for love. In 1940 his song cycle Sonnets from Michelangelo, written for his great love, and life-partner of 39 years, the tenor Peter Pears, ends with a proclamation that love grounded in the beauty of the beloved’s body and soul, fills the heart with a great hope. And only two years after Grimes, in Albert Herring, Britten shows how the crowd itself may come around to accept and love the person whom they tried to persecute. This opera was performed at a festival in Britten’s own home town in Suffolk, a festival founded by Britten and Pears. The setting of the festival is also the setting of the opera, and the festival is isomorphic to the action of the opera: Pears and Britten invite the British public into their formerly off-limits home lives and receive love and adulation. Love overcomes the beastly cruelty of British homophobia, and it really did.

Many other examples could be given: that’s what my new book is all about.

In the first part of the book, you argue that while Mozart’s political vision for society is widely influenced by Enlightenment ideas such as Rousseau's, they do diverge in distinct ways. While Rousseau seeks a politics of the heart, his model often requires homogeneous feelings from citizens. How does Mozart’s "Republic of Love" differ from Rousseau’s vision, and why do you think this provides a more stable ground for liberal democracy?

I do not say Mozart read Rousseau. He was not much of a reader: he preferred billiards to books. He was influenced by the Enlightenment reforms of Joseph II and the general social climate they inspired in Vienna around him and, even more, by his membership in the Freemasons, where he was his lodge’s official composer. What I say is that the ideas we find in his operas can usefully be compared with those of Rousseau and Herder. More like Herder, Mozart accepted and celebrated the diversity and craziness of everyday life, real women and men with all their flaws. When democracy is based on unreal expectations it will have to enforce its ideal by force – as Rousseau exiles all non-right-feeling people from the society he imagines in On the Social Contract. Mozart’s more merciful attitude to human variety is both better and more stable.

You highlight Mozart’s distinctively egalitarian views within his Freemason lodge, specifically his push for the inclusion of women. How do his casting choices of "trouser roles", such as Cherubino, and the replacement of castrati[3] with women convey his calls for reciprocity and vulnerability that are usually associated with the female sphere?

The masculine and feminine in Mozart are cultural, not natural categories. Cherubino, a male, is brought up in the world of women, where he learns sentiments of equality and reciprocity. Vitellia, in La Clemenza di Tito, is a female brought up for a male role of elite rule, in the course of which she learns arrogance and hardness – until her lover Sesto (another trouser role) shows her what emotional depth and understanding look like. In the course of her great aria “Non più di fiori” she literally changes her tune, singing, by the end, more like the tender Sesto than like her former autocratic self.

In real life, Mozart lived in a bourgeois world that gave women a lot of freedom in marital choice. His sister Nannerl (who lived to age 79, whereas he died at 35) was a distinguished performer and composer, and did not marry before her mid-thirties. Mozart’s letters show him having a lot of fun with women – including frank joking about sexual matters -- and treating them as equals. He deliberately chose a Lodge that had no aristocrats and included both bourgeois and working people. He understood that it was the culture of the old aristocracy that oppressed women.

A central theme in your work is that the musical elements in opera often subvert or override the libretto. For instance, Mozart provides emotional depth to female characters that the text alone might treat cynically. In terms of political communication, what can the non-verbal medium of music teach us about the limitations of purely rational or text-based political discourse?

Let’s clear up some confusions first. “Rational” can mean either “containing thought” or, normatively, “containing good thought.” Emotions, as by now biologists working on animal emotions agree, contain thought – often normatively good, oriented to survival. Human emotions are less reliable, often distorted by social factors such as greed and power. So some of the thoughts they contain are normatively bad, but thoughts nonetheless. How much of the thought contained in human emotions is verbal? Not very much. Novelists invent verbal representations of what, in our real minds, often takes the form of images or preverbal reactions (as Henry James noted). Music is a symbol system like language, similarly sophisticated, similarly capable of representing our emotional lives, typically – as with language – with greater sharpness and precision than our emotional world has in daily life.

So it’s obvious that in a work employing both language and music the two symbol systems can be either in harmony or at odds. Wagner wrote all the words himself in order to avoid dissonance. Verdi worked very closely with his librettists to avoid problems. Mozart was not always so lucky. Sometimes the verbal text is vague, and the music gives it a greater emotional precision and sharpness. Cherubino’s aria Voi che sapete could have been set trivially or cynically, rather than tenderly. The Vitellia aria I described contains a profound emotional change, but she says the same words, and it is in the music that her emotions change. Sometimes there can be a real clash, as when Da Ponte’s[4] libretto for Così Fan Tutte remains cynical throughout, and Mozart gradually gives the characters greater emotional depth.

You suggest that in the context of 19th-century Italy, “at a time when signing a manifesto or circulating a pamphlet could be risky, whistling an aria from a Verdi opera courted no risk, and yet could signal a person’s politics to others” (Nussbaum, 2026, p. 179). Is there anything about opera as a medium that makes it such an effective vehicle for political protest beyond this specific historical context?

I think operas are a source of deep thought and introspection, which is better in the long run than a hundred protests. In our media culture thought is so often crude and cheap, and the arts call us to become more worthy selves with deeper insides.

You position Richard Wagner as the primary ideological antagonist of the Mozartean project, influenced by Schopenhauerian pessimism. How does Wagner utilize the seemingly cheerful communal joy depicted in Die Meistersinger to suggest tribalism and conformity as a cure for such pessimism?

From the outset, the work is triumphal, rather than cheerful in an ordinary human way, and it is triumphally monophonic: “I Wagner/Walther the artist have conquered all opposition.” Sachs’s speech at the end says that Walther’s art has won, defining “holy German Art” for the future – but only if all foreign voices are banished. My chapter sees this final statement as growing out of an earlier sense of despair and alienation. It’s a complicated argument.

You end Chapter 7 on a positive note regarding the possibility of resisting the persecutory power of closed communities through “nourishing the core integrity within each person” (p.238). Do you think it is realistically possible to educate people toward true inner strength and integrity when the proliferation of social media and AI-generated content can compromise our understanding of the truth?

We don’t know, do we? But we have to try! Forbidding phones in schools – happening now by law all over the world – is one hopeful starting point. When I teach I forbid all use of AI, as do most of my colleagues. It’s laborious: my TA and I are just reviewing a suspect case, and he has spent hours interviewing the students about their papers. We need to subsidize all arts (theater, opera, instrumental music) that give people deeper experiences of inwardness. We should remember that this is nothing utterly new. People always find ways to avoid themselves: the crowd in Peter Grimes sings little folk ditties and persecutes the one man who invents his own tune. But crowds can also be defeated. In Czech writer Leoš Janáček’s (1854–1928) Jenůfa, How did Jenufa and Laca escape the brutalization of thought and feeling by the culture of the crowd? Partly through a non-crowd religion: Jenufa prays to the Virgin, goddess of outcasts, and this idea gives her inner strength. Others find other sources of strength: for Britten and Pears, it is the sheer making of music by the despised outcasts that both protects their loving integrity and communicates it to others. Partly it is the sheer joy of embodied life that opera reveals and celebrates. That is why I end the book with Verdi’s Falstaff, that praise of the body and spirit by a triumphant octogenarian.

Finally, we couldn’t help but wonder whether some of your insights regarding the role of breath were somehow inspired or informed by your own experience as a soprano singer. Has your personal experience with the physical discipline and vulnerabilities of the singing voice shaped your insights into how ideology is embodied and expressed?

Sure, but watching and talking to really good singers is also important. In my opera class Anthony Freud and I interview some amazing singers such as Lawrence Brownlee, Ana Maria Martinez, and Matthew Polenzani. I think the main thing I learned from my own vocal experience is how to see with sympathy the sort of character I usually have no sympathy for: people bent on revenge. Those roles – Turandot, Mozart’s Elettra, Donna Anna, suit my voice but not my character, so that is educational.

[1] Martha C. Nussbaum, The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018)

[2] Martha C. Nussbaum, The Republic of Love: Opera and Political Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2026)

[3] Male singers who were castrated before puberty in order to preserve their high vocal range. During periods when women's participation on stage was considered taboo, castrati singers were used to perform female roles.

[4] Lorenzo Da Ponte (1749–1838), a librettist and poet of Jewish descent who converted to Christianity and became a Catholic priest. He wrote the librettos for three of Mozart's most famous works: Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte.