What is Wagner’s Parsifal about?

Introduction

A fully-staged performance of Wagner’s Parsifal is always a special occasion, albeit one too often marred by directorial over-reach. It is ten years since the work last appeared in a London opera house. The inhabitants of Budapest are more fortunate; they can count on an annual staging of the composer’s final word at the Hungarian State Opera every Eastertide. This year’s production, directed by András Almási-Tóth, was not altogether free of the excesses of Regietheater – that necessary German word to describe drama in which the personality of the director, and often the paucity of his vision, take centre stage, and where, in the case of Wagner, a vocabulary of subversive banality and ugliness is almost de rigueur.

On this occasion, after the profound spirituality of the prelude to Act 1, it was somehow no surprise that the curtain rose to an array of white plasterboard, woolly hats, jerry cans and mobile phones. However, after this ritual obeisance to the tropes of repudiation and visual impoverishment, matters improved, the orchestra and singers were good, and the production was not only agreeable to look at but contained thoughtful ideas which were justified by reference in the programme to the writings of Slavoj Źiźek and Roger Scruton.

British philosopher Roger Scruton (Shutterstock)

The inclusion of the latter reminds us of the fact that, for all the beauties of its music, we need help with understanding Parsifal. Whatever the controversies among Wagnerians that swirl around the head of their hero and his works, none is so intense, and at the same time so confused as that which surrounds the evaluation of this one. It was with the aim of clarifying that confusion that Scruton wrote his last book before his death in January 2020, Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption.

No such bafflement applies to Wagner’s earlier works. Among those who are open-minded or receptive to his genius, there is not much of a dispute about the qualities of Lohengrin, say, or Der fliegende Holländer (“The Flying Dutchman”). Many books have been written on what exactly the Ring cycle is about, but that it is about something important is generally acknowledged to be incontrovertible. There is a lively and well-worn controversy about whether or not there are anti-Semitic elements in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (“The Mastersingers of Nuremberg”), but even those who say that there are – such as Barry Millington – concede that these elements are tangential to the work as a whole. Tristan und Isolde is for many reasons in a category of its own; of all Wagner’s creations, it is the most universally acknowledged to be the product of genius. It is also the work of Wagner’s which most closely resembles Parsifal, thanks to its hypnotic score, and the extent to which it bears the imprint of Schopenhauer.

When it comes to Parsifal itself, however, something quite different happens. There is radical disagreement even among Wagnerians – a disagreement, which in large part stems, as already hinted, from the fact that no one seems to be quite sure what on earth he intended by it. Another reason is that, until three years ago, no good book had ever been written on the opera. My own friendship with Roger began with an email which I importunately sent him out of the blue after returning from a production of the opera at Bayreuth – we had at that stage never met – urging him to write that very book. It took him many years, for he had first to commit to paper his thoughts on the Ring, but write it he eventually did.

Although in some ways it stands apart, Parsifal is a logical and integrated development of themes which are found in Wagner’s earlier works. There are many elements within it which correspond with or are a summation of those in earlier Wagner operas. Indeed, it is perhaps not universally known that Wagner at one stage contemplated having the wandering Parsifal of the prelude to act 3 making an appearance at Tristan’s castle Kareol, presumably to ask his dying host for directions to Monsalvat. Fortunately he thought better of this idea.

On the links between Parsifal and earlier works, here is the ever-dependable Bryan Magee. “The leading characters in this opera have many striking things in common with those of Wagner’s previous ones, as if his lifelong preoccupations are being drawn together. Kundry, like the Flying Dutchman, is tied to a chain of being several times the length of a normal lifetime, and is seeking liberation from it. Meanwhile, like Tannhäuser’s, her existence is torn equally between self-abandonment to sexual gratification and being a dutiful contributor to an ordered society. In fact, the theme of sex as the destroyer of fulfilment is foundational to the whole opera, as it is to Tannhäuser. Parsifal, like Siegfried, is at first an ignorant and fearless boy who knows nothing at all of the world, has no idea where he comes from or who his father was, and has no notion of women – except, inadequately, his mother – and consequently no notion of sex… Klingsor, like Alberich, has acquired power by sacrificing his capacity to love, and like Wotan has volunteered the loss of a vital organ as the price to be paid for special knowledge and understanding. His magic garden looks suspiciously like the Venusberg. Gurnemanz, like the Wanderer, is old, world-weary, and all resignation: he observes everything, understands everything, comments wisely on everything, but does not act other than ineffectively. And finally Amfortas actually is Tristan, at least in Wagner’s mind, the Tristan of Act 3, dying endlessly in intolerable anguish from a wound acquired through making love, and ravaged by a longing so terrible that it would kill him if it were not the only thing keeping him alive. In Tristan, however Tristan dies: in Parsifal, Tristan is redeemed.”

This fine and perceptive writing does not dispel the question: what is Parsifal actually about? Of the many points of view expressed, it is perhaps helpful to isolate three. The first is the anathematisation of the opera as evidencing the final moral collapse of an unspeakable human being. This attack focuses on the question of anti-Semitism, and as usual, the composer himself (alas) provides most of the ammunition. Its principal proponent is Wagner’s 1968 biographer Robert Gutman. The second position, a far more interesting and plausible one, is to see Parsifal in the light of the two great philosophers connected with Wagner’s mature work: Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The third is the comprehensive attempt to explain Parsifal in religious terms undertaken by Scruton. He had already written an important essay on the Nietzsche/Wagner controversy, but in his final book, he came fully to develop his own analysis of the work.

We may call these three approaches Parsifal as racism, Parsifal as philosophy and Parsifal as sacrament.

Parsifal as racism

For Gutman, the key to Parsifal is the nature of Wagner’s political and polemical writings which were contemporaneous with its composition. Although he acknowledges the supreme beauty of the music and (more grudgingly) the fact that there are other preoccupations within the work, he sees Parsifal essentially through the prism of anti-Semitism. His point of view is reflected by his follower Professor Robert Greenberg, the nuance of whose wilfully superficial critique is conveyed by his view that the opera is a “revolting chunk of racist propaganda set to some of the most sublime music ever composed”. Expressed in the gaudy language that Professor Greenberg prefers, the thesis is that the grail knights are Aryan proto-Nazis, one of whom has been corrupted by a Jewish whore who is in the control of a (you guessed it) Jewish puppet-master, and what they need (and get) is another Aryan to rescue them.

The easiest way to illustrate the extremity of this point of view is to quote extracts from Gutman’s biography. One does so with a heavy heart.

Referring to Wagner’s 1881 essay Heldentum und Christentum (“Heroism and Christianity”), Gutman writes that “the composer described the Aryans, the great Teutonic world leaders, as sprung from the very gods, in contrast to the coloured man, to whom he conceded the rather lowly Darwinian descent from the monkey. It was his purpose in Heldentum and its artistic counterpart Parsifal [note the begged question] to confront Germany with the seriousness of its racial crisis – to outline the perfection, decline, and hopes for regeneration of the debased Aryan. Surveying the world from the heights of Monsalvat, the Grail community in Parsifal was alarmed to observe natural selection working against its distinctive Aryanism. At its expense, others were growing more adroit, and the gods’ very own appeared headed towards erasure. Something was terribly wrong; the evolutionary machinery was malfunctioning, confusing the fit with the unfit. Instead of working towards endless improvement and Aryan perfection, it was producing racial corruption. The knights were confronted with an enemy gaining upon them every day. Here was the decisive racial crisis that grew into an uncompromising struggle for power. Parsifal’s false facade of Christian abnegation masks this almost insane conflict. Monsalvat was Wagner’s paranoiac concept of a small self-contained elite group, uniquely possessed of the truth, obsessed with its ‘purity’ and struggling with an outside world it held worthless. Redemption was promised the hard-pressed knights, but obviously, the Wagnerian redeemer was not to be found among Jewish craftsman or lepers. Not by accident did Gurnemanz almost immediately remark upon Parsifal’s noble highborn appearance. He knew what signs to read.

“For Wagner and his followers the problem was enormous. He had set Parsifal within the framework of a medieval Christian tale, Christ’s blood being the agent of the various characters’ redemption. Benighted historians, lacking Wagnerian insight, had gulled the world into believing Christ a Jew. Wagner had declared the identification of Christ’s God with the tribal God of Israel to be ‘one of the most terrible derangements of world history’. How could that Jewish blood Wagner condemned as infectious at the same time be the source of mankind’s deliverance? There had followed a bolder pronouncement to the effect that ‘it remains more than doubtful that Jesus himself was of Jewish stock’.

“Wagner asked whether there were anyone sufficiently sacrilegious to inquire concerning the racial composition of Christ’s blood. A dazzling leap brought Wagner forward with a new revelation. In Christ’s veins flowed a kind of super-blood which, though above individual race, was yet an archetypical manifestation of the Aryan species. As epitome of all humanity’s conscious suffering, this blood symbolised the ultimate Aryan conquest of the will – its complete abrogation, leaving only the will to redeem.

“In Parsifal, with the help of church bells, snippets of the Mass and the vocabulary and paraphernalia of the Passion, he set forth a religion of racism under the cover of Christian legend. Parsifal is an enactment of the Aryan’s plight, struggle and hope for redemption … the temple scenes are, in a sense, Black Masses, perverting the symbols of the Eucharist and dedicating them to a sinister God.”

There is much more of this stuff. Some may think that it is itself an almost deranged and fundamentally misguided view of Parsifal. There are many obvious answers to the whole thesis. First, the case put depends very heavily on the appalling writings on racial purity of the elderly Wagner. But Parsifal had been gestating in the composer’s mind for decades before then: he had read Wolfram von Eschenbach’s poem in 1845; he was thinking about it as a separate opera by 1857 and had completed a prose draft in 1865 at the latest. It was as early as 1859, 20 years before its composition, that Wagner wrote: “Amfortas is my Tristan of the third act, but inconceivably intensified.” Of course, Wagner was always an anti-Semite, but the obsessive ideas of blood purity found in his later writings were not characteristic of this earlier stage.

Secondly, of Wagner’s contemporaries, including many who abhorred his anti-Semitism (like Nietzsche), few if any were able to discern anything about Parsifal that registered on the dial. It is odd that post-Holocaust scholars (and would-be scholars) are able to see the true position more clearly than Wagner’s contemporaries or indeed than the Nazis, who regarded Parsifal as ideologically unacceptable. (Hitler adored Wagner and hated Jews, but not once referred to Wagner’s writings on the subject.) Thirdly, it is striking that Wagner, who said and wrote so much about his art, and who was positively proud of his prejudice, never said a word which would justify the reading into Parsifal of a racial agenda. Nor did the equally verbose and even more awful Cosima, his second wife. So audiences were apparently expected to decipher for themselves this urgent warning of imminent danger. Fourthly, the character of Kundry (whose identification with Ahasuerus – doomed to wander through the ages for the sin of mocking the condemned Christ – links her more explicitly with a Jewish identity than any other character in Wagner’s canon) receives the most tender and moving treatment in her act 3 transformation into the figure of Mary Magdalene. Not only did Wagner write that it would be impossible for him ever to portray a Jew on stage, but in the case of Kundry he was quite obviously intent on doing no such thing. (Klingsor is certainly a monster, but to see him as a Jewish monster involves assuming at the outset what requires to be proven.)

Moreover, as Nathan Shields has written in his excellent essay Wagner and the Jews, “Kundry is both character and symbol, descended from a long line of symbolic figures: not the conniving, hunchbacked villains whom scholars invariably stamp as Jewish, but the Dutchman, Tannhäuser, Wotan – the very figures into whom Wagner put the most of himself. Each wanders restlessly; each finds peace only in death. And the redemption Wagner has in mind for Kundry is the same redemption he has in mind for each of his heroes, and for us. The images are various, but their meaning remains the same, whether we plunge into the sea like the Dutchman, or dissolve into the night like Tristan, or sink beneath the rising Rhine like the whole of creation at the end of Götterdämmerung. Only one thing can redeem us from the burden of our curse: going under.” Although that last phrase is a conscious echo of the sinister final sentence of Wagner’s Das Judentum in der Musik, Shields maintains that Wagner’s music “embodies, at the level of immediate experience, the same sense of homelessness, the same longing to transcend and to go under, that the words strain vainly to articulate”.

The last and perhaps most important point in rebuttal of the Gutman argument is indeed the music itself. There is not a hint of vileness or racism here. Some form of case can be made (though many reject it) for discerning Jewish patterns in the music of Mime or even Beckmesser. But not even Gutman claims to find a trace in the music of what he says the opera is really about. By this stage in his career, and under the influence of Schopenhauer, Wagner had come to realise that the music, and not the words, was the primary element of communication in his dramas. It does not seem to occur to Gutman or Greenberg that there is a fundamental inconsistency – or at least something that requires properly explaining – in such ugly thoughts being expressed in beautiful music, and that the music is rather an important signifier to the possibility that the entire opera is actually about something quite different.

As Michael Tanner says, “If one studied and listened to the work itself with the greatest care, without knowing Wagner’s attitude as expressed in his contemporaneous writings, it could never occur to one that he had any anti-Semitic views. It may seem strange that someone could fervently advocate a set of convictions simultaneously with producing his most deeply felt work of art, and that the second should have nothing to do with the first, but just that is what we find.” Or again, John Deathridge: “critics of Parsifal’s supposed inhumanity will always find it hard to account for the fascinating beauty of the score, and the inconvenient fact that militancy and aggression could not be further removed from its central idea.”

Parsifal as philosophy

This brings us on to the second way of looking at Parsifal, which is as a work of philosophy, in which the principal burden of the philosophical argument, as with other Wagner masterpieces, is carried on in the music. For these purposes, it is essential to appreciate the influence on Wagner’s mature work of the philosophy of Schopenhauer and in particular his masterpiece The World as Will and Representation, which Wagner first read in 1854. Tristan and Parsifal are, as already stated, Wagner’s Schopenhauerian operas par excellence.

Frankfurt, Germany: statue of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer from artist Friedrich Schierholz from 1895 in Frankfurt.

The basic metaphysical predicate which Schopenhauer postulates is the will. The will is the essential reality in the world behind the world of mere appearances. We are all emanations of the will, and the notion that we are individuated into separate entities is, at bottom, an illusion. The will, as its name suggests, strives blindly and ceaselessly. Because we are manifestations of this single will, our lives necessarily reflect its striving and restless character. It may be said, at the risk of oversimplification, that Tristan is the embodiment of book 2 of The World as Will and Representation, while Parsifal is the embodiment of book 4.

In book 2, Schopenhauer develops the pessimistic vision for which he is famous. “Eternal becoming, endless flux belong to the revelation of the essence of the will.” Our desires always delude us into believing that their fulfilment is the final goal of willing, but as soon as they are attained they are forgotten, grow antiquated and are laid aside as vanished delusions. We are lucky enough when there is still something left to desire and strive after, to carry on the game of constantly passing from desire to satisfaction and thence to new desire, a game whose rapid course is called happiness and slow course is suffering.

This is an apt description of the music of Tristan, with its constant and restless moving without satisfaction on to a new discord; the ear is always on tenterhooks waiting for a tonal resolution which never arrives. It is the musical equivalent of the insatiable craving and yearning which Schopenhauer says is our lot. The only resolution is the final chord, and the only way out for the protagonists is death, where the illusion of their individuation will be dissolved and they will be united.

There is in fact another means of escape from being tossed ceaselessly on the tempests of the will, like Francesca da Rimini in Dante’s Inferno. Schopenhauer addresses it in book 4: renunciation and self-denial enable one to overcome the will. Schopenhauer, though an atheist, here cites with approval the example of Christian and Buddhist saints and ascetics. The means by which this state of mind can be most easily accessed is by compassion for one’s fellow man – than which nothing in a sense could be more natural, since we are all one in any event.

The hero of Parsifal overcomes desire in the form of Kundry’s embrace. And, as Magee argues, the experience constitutes a breakthrough for him in understanding and insight. Through it, he achieves compassionate empathy, not only with Amfortas, but with suffering mankind in general, eternally stretched out on the rack of unsatisfiable willing. He comes to understand the need for redemption, and also what it means to be a Redeemer, who takes on himself the burdens of suffering humanity – and therefore the significance of the re-enactment of the Last Supper, which he had witnessed so uncomprehendingly in Act 1. All becomes clear to him. He understands that redemption is not be found through observances, nor through any form of self-gratification, but through its opposite, namely denial of the will in all its forms: if in love, then utterly one-way love; if through power, then mastery over oneself, not mastery over others; if in death, then in death as a fulfilment of life, not as an escape from it; if in ritual, then in enactments dedicated wholly to something outside and beyond the participants, through self-effacement in the transcendental. So the man who brings redemption to most of the other characters, and to the order of knights, himself finds redemption in the process.

As in Tristan, it is the music of Parsifal which conducts the philosophical argument. In all Wagner’s music up to this point, there has been an unmistakable assertion of will. It is a notorious phenomenon – widely commented on, and probably unique in terms of its intensity. The music has an enormously powerful drive of assertiveness that seems to sweep everything before it, an unremitting vehemence that never for a moment lets up. More than any other characteristic of Wagner’s music, it is the one that those who dislike it react against most.

But in Parsifal, this wilful assertiveness is largely absent. True, we hear it in association with Klingsor, and sometimes with the knights’ hollow assertion of a ritual that has become meaningless. But for most of the opera, the music is, as it were, undriven. It proceeds with calm and slow deliberation as if unfolding spontaneously from inside. The orchestration is all inner clarity – diaphanous, translucent, suffused, glimmering. The serenely radiant and ecstatic quality of the score has led many people to say that they find it the most beautiful music ever composed. What we have here is renunciation in the form of music, denial-of-the-will as music-drama.

Nietzsche had in his time been a passionate disciple of both Schopenhauer and Wagner. But he came to the view that Schopenhauer’s postulate of the will was a basic metaphysical mistake. There was, he decided, no transcendental realm of reality, no Kantian Ding an sich (“thing in itself”), no division between the worlds of will and of representation. The visible world was all that there was, and one must live life in it and affirm that life to the utmost of one’s ability. God was dead, and the war of all against all in the constant struggle for life-assertion was the natural order of things. Morality was nonsense, and simply got in the way of the onward march of civilisation conceived in these unconsoling terms.

Nietzsche never ceased to recognise the originality and greatness of Wagner’s music. But he came to distrust it for its intoxicating quality, and for its Romantic celebration of death. Ultimately, he came to see it as decadent and nihilistic, functioning as a kind of artistic drug that deadened the pain of existence instead of affirming life with all its sufferings. “In the art of seduction”, he wrote, “Parsifal will always retain its rank — as the stroke of genius in seduction. — I admire this work; I wish I had written it myself. — Wagner never had better inspirations than in the end. Here the cunning in his alliance of beauty and sickness goes so far that, as it were, it casts a shadow over Wagner’s earlier art — which now seems too bright, too healthy. Do you understand this? Health, brightness having the effect of a shadow? almost of an objection? — To such an extent have we become pure fools. — Never was there a greater master in dim, hieratic aromas — never was a man equally expert in all small infinities, all that trembles and is effusive, all the feminisms from the idioticon of happiness! — Drink, O my friends, the philtres of this art! Nowhere will you find a more agreeable way of enervating your spirit, of forgetting your manhood under a rosebush. — Ah, this old magician! This Klingsor of all Klingsors! How he thus wages war against us! us, the free spirits! How he indulges every cowardice of the modern soul with the tones of magic maidens! — Never before has there been such a deadly hatred of the search for knowledge! – One has to be a cynic in order not to be seduced here; one has to be able to bite in order not to worship here. Well, then, you old seducer, the cynic warns you — cave canem.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887.
(Shutterstock)

The whole concept of Parsifal was therefore offensive to Nietzsche. Compassion and self-denial were the wrong paths for humanity to take in order to expiate the original sin of existence. In Scruton’s words, “For Nietzsche an aesthetic justification of the world is one that affirms life and health against decline and sickness. It is in direct conflict with the Christian justification, which elevates meekness, compassion and other such life-denying virtues over the life-affirming virtues on which the future of mankind depends and of which [he] went on to give an alarming description”. For good measure, Nietzsche also rejected the opera’s opposition between sensuality and chastity, writing that “The preaching of chastity remains an incitement to anti-nature: I despise everyone who does not experience Parsifal as an attempted assassination of basic ethics.”

It is coherent to interpret Parsifal as a final assertion on Wagner’s part of Schopenhauer’s ethical values, and as an implicit repudiation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. The approach is therefore acceptable as far as it goes, and has the great merit (unlike the Gutman/Greenberg thesis) of actually listening to the music. The question remains whether the account which it gives is sufficiently complete.

Parsifal as sacrament

The third way of looking at Parsifal is the only one which takes with true seriousness the composer’s specific choice of subject-matter. To make a point too obvious to require elaboration, the subject-matter of Parsifal is religious. The previous two approaches which have been discussed do not give full weight to this choice. The third does. It honours the composer’s reference to Parsifal not as an opera or even (like his other works) a music drama but as a Bühnenweihfestpiel, a festival play for the consecration of the stage.

It is beyond argument that Parsifal is a deeply-felt composition. It should be uncontroversial that it is a work of integrity. Wagner may not have believed in the Christian or any other religious doctrines, but he respected their importance. His posture towards them is not ironical or insincere (and Nietzsche was wrong to suppose otherwise). A quotation of Wagner’s almost too well-known to need repeating places art (especially his own art) as the successor to religion but recognises the role of each. “It is reserved to art to salvage the kernel of religion, inasmuch as the mythical images which religion would wish to be believed as true are apprehended in art for their symbolic value, and through ideal representation of those symbols art reveals the concealed deep truth within them.”

Wagner was therefore not guilty of bad faith in seeking to adopt the holiest rituals of the Christian church as the subject-matter of Parsifal. But we cannot definitively acquit Wagner of hypocrisy in choosing a religious subject without asking what it means to call Parsifal a religious work. That in turn engages the question what we mean by religion and – if one way of approaching Parsifal is through Scruton’s book – what he thought religion was about. It was a topic which he addressed time and again in his books, increasingly in his final years.

As a conservative and an Englishman, Scruton cherished many aspects of the Church of England, its liturgy and traditions. He approved of the fact that “when two are three are gathered together”, God would, at least according to the faith of those present, grant their requests. These were essentially cultural judgements. Beyond that, it is often difficult when reading Scruton on Wagner’s relationship with religion to tell whether he was writing about himself or the composer. Their positions were quite close.

As far as it is possible to tell, Scruton’s religion did not entail the assertion of an independent metaphysical reality. If required to answer yes or no to the question “Is there anything out there?”, he would have answered in the negative, or at least, following Kant, that there is nothing that we could ever say, think or imagine about anything that was out there. God was at best to be understood in the words of the Welsh poet and priest RS Thomas, who referred to “this great absence/that is like a presence, that compels me to address it without hope/of a reply”.

Ludwig Feuerbach had argued in a book which greatly influenced the younger Wagner that the gods whom humans worship are not actual heavenly beings who preside over our affairs with greater or lesser benignity according to taste, but mere projections of human aspirations and longings: “In every aspect God corresponds to some feature or need of human nature.” Worship of God is therefore essentially an anthropological or psychological phenomenon of projection, whereby meaning is conferred on life, moral laws are determined, bargains are enforced and redemption is sought by appeal to an invisible external authority. Nonetheless, this vision does not leave religion with nothing to do on earth. Even if one throws away the metaphysical bathwater, something precious is left behind. This is the golden residue which Wagner extracted from Feuerbach and depicted in his mature operas. That something is denoted by three words with a common etymology – the sacred, the sacramental and the sacrificial. This trio of related concepts was for Scruton at the heart of religion; they were the means by which we might still find redemption, even though we must find it for ourselves, since Parsifal was “a work that raises imploring hands to a Heaven that seems never to reach down in return”.

For consider: Parsifal is steeped in Christian ritual and imagery, but it never mentions Jesus by name. God is referred to only in passing. Good Friday is commemorated, but there is no Easter Sunday. The Crucifixion is the foundational symbol of the work; beyond a glancing remark by the agonised Amfortas in Act 3, there is nothing to suggest a Resurrection. There is magic and transcendence, but there is no promise of eternal life. How different this is from the orthodox Christian teaching of St Paul, who wrote that if Christ did not rise from the dead our whole faith is futile.

An early version of Scruton’s book contained a lengthy treatment of St Mark’s Gospel in the light of its interpretation by John Carroll in his book The Existential Jesus. For better or worse, this entire section was excised from the published version, surviving only as an endnote, but it remains an important clue to his thinking.

Here is a passage from the original text. “Hope plays no real part in the knights’ salvation and immersion in sacred moments is all that the brotherhood of Monsalvat offers to those whom it includes. Can that be enough? Can we have religion without the hope of eternal life? Wagner’s answer is yes we can; and yes we must, since life needs religion if it is to be lived. What has the Redeemer to do with this intransitive religion, this religion without the after-life and God? What was the Redeemer’s message, and to what effect? In his book, John Carroll has drawn the portrait of the individual who is the central character in the gospel according to St Mark – the earliest gospel to be written down, and one clearly embodying eye-witness accounts. Mark’s gospel, Carroll insists, is the story of a person who enters the world as a stranger, and enacts his solitary being to the end. God gets a mention here and there, but only at the edge of things, when the narrative abuts on the wondrous, the inexplicable and the ‘great fear’ that invades us in the face of nothingness. Jesus should be understood as replacing the creator God, not representing him. … The existential Parsifal, like the existential Jesus of John Carroll, makes sense without the promise of eternal life. He comes into the community from outside, not because he is bearing messages from another world, but because he himself is the message …”

For people of a literal religious disposition, this explanation may be a disappointment, even an affront. Many Christians see Parsifal as a straightforward re-enactment of the Eucharist within the context of an orthodox doctrinal position. These people may object that Carroll fails to acknowledge the account of the Resurrection in Mark’s Gospel. The answer is that that depends on where the original or authentic Gospel ends, whether (as most modern scholars do) one regards its final verses as a later addition. “The astonishing ending to Mark’s gospel in what is now taken to be its original version, avoids the question of the after-life [writes Scruton]. The three women come to the tomb, encounter a young man in a white robe, who tells them not to be afraid, that the crucified Nazarene has arisen and gone before them into Galilee. ‘They fled from the tomb quivering in ecstatic fear. They said nothing to no one, for they were terrified.’ And so the gospel ends … The question of Jesus’s resurrection is left without an answer.”

On this interpretation, the message of Parsifal is to show us what redemption means when it is not God but human beings who provide it. Redemption comes from the other, who suffers as we suffer, and who through compassion offers to share our burden, and to retrieve what we have lost. The religion of Montsalvat is not based in a promise of another world. It is an invitation to live differently in this world, and so to find redemption through our own efforts, and without the help of God. Faith is therefore real, but it is intransitive (the phrase comes from Erich Heller’s great essay on Nietzsche and Rilke). The reader may ask: in what way and to what extent does this faith, which offers no compensating afterlife, nevertheless console us for our sorrow; and what part is played in this by the sacrifice of a Redeemer who has long ago gone from the world? The answer cannot be given in words. This is in their nature; they are too articulate. But music is not, and this music is “an icon of the consecrated life, reaching to the very limit of our prayers in its call for wholeness and healing … beyond the deepest cry of the wounded soul, it leads … to forgiveness and closure”.

Artur Schnabel is reputed to have said that great music is music which is better than it can ever be performed. Parsifal is an opera which is deeper than it can ever be understood, and all analyses are necessarily partial. It is a mountain always to some degree veiled in cloud. But this last approach treats it as a sincerely religious work and accords proper weight to its patent seriousness, its specific choice of subject-matter, and above all to what the music tells us, while remaining consistent with Wagner’s known philosophical standpoint. Roger Scruton’s The Music of Redemption thus comes as close as perhaps any book could to answering the question which this essay began.

This article is adapted from a lecture given at the Common Sense Society in Budapest in April 2023.

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