RT: As does someone you probably don't like very much: Heidegger. 

RS: No, no, he has this too.

RT: It's as if we're "too late for the gods and too early for Being". [Your book] Death-Devoted Heart is a fantastic work on Tristan and Isolde, but it encompasses two things that may not quite fit together: one is your sense that Wagner is trying to reconstruct the sacred out of purely humanistic materials, and the other is the profoundly pessimistic thought that, in the end, the consummation of life is in death. That's where I find it difficult to follow you, because it's a difficult doctrine to make live in one's own life.

RS: Yes, I don't go along with the Wagnerian mysticism about the erotic. But there is a truth in it, and what I want to say is that erotic love does first of all emphasise that this thing has within it a kind of redemptive force. It's a redemptive force that comes through our acknowledgement of our own nature as dying things.

DJ: Roger, would you like to sum up what you think is the code by which you think a modern, educated, sensitive and humane person can hope to live? What is it that we believe?

RS: Gosh. Well, I can say what I believe. One must be open to transcendence, open to the recognition first of all of the mystery of your being and the mystery of the being of others. That isn't unique to the Western tradition. Hinduism is a very good example of how this is done, especially by encouraging us to look for the transcendent in the everyday. However, and this is much more special to the Western tradition, one has to be able to learn to look on oneself as another. This idea of the "otherness" of oneself, which is summed up in the Ancient Greek concept of irony, is all-important, especially now that fundamental metaphysical doctrines are in doubt. 

Looking at oneself in that way, one can learn both to forgive oneself and others. This is the beginning of wisdom. But what one builds upon it depends on whether one's been lucky enough to find others with whom one can live at peace and in a condition of affection.

DJ: That's a very impressive credo. Ray, what do you feel about this? Music in the highest sense is unique to the West. Is music important to you as a redemptive force?

RT: It is an extraordinary force. I am very much with Roger on this profound significance of music. I don't compose as Roger does, I don't play any instrument and I don't have any ability in musicological analysis, but the point where we converge is the profound joy that music brings to both of us.

One thing I find interesting about classical music — and again it was a point made in one of your books, Roger — is that in recent centuries we enjoy music in a rather unusual way. We sit still and sit silent. We attend concerts almost as worshippers and it was this, it seemed to me, that Wagner exploited in his elevated notion of the music-drama.