The Republic of Love

A major work of scholarship by world-renowned, prize-winning philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, The Republic of Love reveals opera as a profound form of political thought--and an often-overlooked force behind the political reforms of the Enlightenment.
In The Republic of Love, world-renowned philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum offers a bold and original vision of opera's contribution to political thought. Drawing on her deep knowledge of classical and contemporary opera, she reveals how composers such as Mozart, Verdi, Strauss, Beethoven, and others used their music to explore the emotional and ethical dimensions of human life. These works, she argues, illuminate our fundamental need for dignity, love, and freedom in the face of oppressive institutions--and they gesture toward new possibilities for how we might live together.
Nussbaum devotes the first half of her book to Mozart, who embraced a new vision of freedom, writing male characters singing in a new emotional landscape, one that elevated the freedom of others. Her readings of The Marriage of Figaro, Idomeneo, The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni and Così Fan Tutte show an artist who recognized the capacity for love in everyone, and advanced fertile ideas about how we might cultivate it in a new kind of republic. The second half of her book follows this line of thought in operas by Beethoven, Verdi, Benjamin Britten, John Adams, and Jake Heggie, and their greatest antagonist, Richard Wagner, suggesting that they all, in a variety of ways, engage in conversation with Mozart and his themes of love and freedom. Throughout, Nussbaum identifies a recurring operatic metaphor for the impulse toward freedom: the act of breathing itself.
A major work of scholarship by a prize-winning thinker, The Republic of Love redefines opera as a vital, if often overlooked, engine of Enlightenment ideals--and a powerful resource for imagining the emotional foundations of political life.

Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. A leading scholar of wide range, she is the author of over two dozen books, including The Fragility of Goodness, Creating Capabilities, Upheavals of Thought, Anger and Forgiveness, Justice for Animals, and most recently The Tenderness of Silent Minds: Benjamin Britten and his War Requiem (2024). She is the recipient of the 2016 Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, the 2018 Berggruen Prize, and the 2021 Holberg Prize.

- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One
- Chapter 1. Equality and Love at the End of The Marriage of Figaro: Forging Democratic Emotions
- Chapter 2. Mozart and the Freemasons: Idomeneo and The Magic Flute
- Chapter 3. Two Problem Operas: Don Giovanni and Così Fan Tutte
- Chapter 4. "If You Could See This Heart": Mercy in La Clemenza di Tito
- Part Two
- Chapter 5. Revenge and the Prison: Beethoven's Fidelio, Heggie's Dead Man Walking
- Chapter 6. Liberty or the Inquisition?: Authority and Fear in Verdi's Don Carlos
- Chapter 7. Internal Exiles: Oppression and Reconciliation in Britten and Janácek
- Chapter 8. War and the Search for Peace: John Adams's Nixon in China
- Chapter 9. Ahasuerus "Redeemed": Wagner from Despair to the Closed Community
- Chapter 10. "A Pandemonium as Bright as the Sun and as Crazy as a Madhouse": Verdi's Falstaff