Heather MacDonald knows how to write an arresting lead. Her latest column in City Journal opens with this line: Mozart’s lighthearted opera The Abduction from the Seraglio does not call for a prostitute’s nipples to be sliced off and presented to the lead soprano.

She explains:

Welcome to Regietheater (German for “director’s theater”), the style of opera direction now prevalent in Europe. Regietheater embodies the belief that a director’s interpretation of an opera is as important as what the composer intended, if not more so. By an odd coincidence, many cutting-edge directors working in Europe today just happen to discover the identical lode of sex, violence, and opportunity for hackneyed political “critique” in operas ranging from the early Baroque era to that of late Romanticism.

My musical taste is not so refined as it should be (which is to say that I have little knowledge of opera), but I nonetheless found MacDonald's piece to be interesting as well as educational. She chronicles the rise of such artistic atrocities and examines the history and possible future of the NYC Met, which has thus far resisted joining such desecration. It is a magnificent article, and I highly recommend it.

And yet, there was something lacking. Her explanation of the impetus behind such violation of the great cultural triumphs of Western civilization is incomplete. What she says is true. This is a mark of the triumph of adolescent culture; government subsidies do allow directors to stage productions that the public will never pay to see. She notes, quite rightly, that:

without Mozart or Verdi, the Regietheater director is nothing; he cannot even hope for third-rate avant-garde status. In a world where displaying bodily fluids in jars, performing sex acts in public, or trampling religious symbols will land you a gig at the Venice Biennale and a government grant, the only source of outrage still available to the would-be scourge of propriety is to desecrate great works of art.

MacDonald comes closest to a complete understanding of the cause whenshe notes that the directors of such outrages have a “simplistic understanding of human experience,” and complains that they seek to reduce everything to base urges by, for example, seeking to “unmask courtly decorum as just a cover for fornication.” But she stops there, neglecting to delve into the souls of the purveyors of such putrescence to see what is at the root of such a dismal view. This neglect is probably due to her disbelief in souls.

As a confirmed atheist, MacDonald can say nothing more than that these operatic savages lack Enlightenment values—hardly great spiritual insight. But she does speak more truly than she knows when she refers to “desecration” of great art. Reducing the great themes of opera to brute sex and violence is a literal taking away of the sacred. Nobility, love, loyalty and heroism are manifestations of the human soul, as are jealousy, avarice and pride. Great art is a window into the transcendent, by way of the human soul and condition.

MacDonald recognizes this to some extent, as evidenced by her worthy passion for great art. Her excellent essay in Why I Turned Right contained this memorable line that I’ve quoted before:

The professoriate had been given the greatest luxury society can offer: studying beauty. All they needed to do to justify that privilege was to help students see why they should fall on bended knees before Aeschylus, Mozart, or Tiepolo, in thanks for lifting us out of our usual stupidity and dullness. Instead they set themselves up as more important than the literature and art that it was their duty to curate and created and tangle of antihumanistic nonsense that merely licensed students’ ignorance.

What she fails to understand is how easily atheistic materialism destroys reverence for greatness and beauty. If humans don’t have souls, if we’re just meat machines, then love becomes lust, joy becomes pleasure, real diabolic cruelty becomes mere animal viciousness and sadism. All these elevated sentiments are mere illusions and pretensions, at root it’s all blood, semen, phlegm and digestive juices.

The condition of modern man, as Francis Schaeffer noted, is one of division, for he is incapable of living in accord with his philosophy. Man cannot be reduced to mere matter. The violation of great art is a scream against the transcendent—its existence is clearly evident in Mozart and Shakespeare, but modern man doesn’t believe it exists. And this is torment. Greatness must be brought down and shown to be merely muck and mud with paint on. It must be reduced, demystified, stripped naked and left shivering, unable to even feel mortification because shame has also been stripped away.

This, I believe, is the motivation behind the efforts to deconstruct great art and smother it in filth. MacDonald writes eloquently against this, but for all her perceptiveness, she is stymied by her atheism. How can she reasonably complain about desecration when nothing is sacred? Her sentiments and intuitions rise about her metaphysics. She knows that there is indeed such a thing as glory and that truth, love and beauty are real. And I hope this knowledge will lead her to the Source of these.