Review

Wagner’s Parsifal: the Music of Redemption by Roger Scruton

(London: Allen Lane, 2020).
doi:10.1017/S003181912000025X

This book, completed just before his untimely death in 2019, con-
cludes Roger Scruton’s trilogy of commentaries on Wagner’s three
greatest masterpieces. In Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sacred
in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (2004), Scruton gave us one of the
deepest and richest treatment that that intoxicating drama has ever re-
ceived, arguing, among much else, that its protagonists must be re-
garded as creatures of the night. In The Ring of Truth: the Wisdom
of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung (2016), he did something that
one would have thought nearly impossible. For well over a century,
no genuinely good book on Wagner’s huge tetralogy existed (the
first complete performance of the Ring was given in 1876). There
was much that was suggestive or intermittently insightful, but,
until Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht published Finding an
Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s Ring in 2004, there was nothing
that went consistently to the heart of the matter. Then, a bare
dozen years later, like the two buses that proverbially come along at
once, Scruton published his own study, which if anything is even
better. And now, in Wagner’s Parsifal: the Music of Redemption, the
set is brought to a fine conclusion. A greedy person (I’m one)
would have loved a book on Die Meistersinger too – it would have an-
swered very exactly to the social philosopher in Scruton – but we
must be grateful that he managed as much as he did. To have
written these three studies already puts him in a place by himself.
If one were to list the qualities of the ideal Wagner critic, the top
five items would have to go something like this. 1) A deep knowledge
of music and a thorough grasp of its workings. Wagner didn’t write
operas, he composed music-dramas, and any worthwhile treatment
of his output must be alert to that: his often revolutionary compos-
itional decisions are themselves parts of the dramatic fabric, and if
one is deaf to those one will be deaf to much of the drama too. 2) A
profound knowledge of and sympathy with the various strands of
post-Kantian thought with which the German nineteenth century
was suffused. Wagner was a thinker as well as a composer, and his
works are as often conceptual explorations as they are musical ones,

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shot to the core with the various idealisms and reactions to idealism
that Kant provoked in the philosophers who succeeded him. 3) A
thorough familiarity with Wagner’s source-materials. Whether he is
reworking a Norse saga, a medieval romance or a piece of Christian
liturgy, Wagner always reworks, and the motivations for his adjust-
ments and often radical transformations seldom fail to repay atten-
tion. 4) Deep psychological acuity. If the states of mind in which
Wagner’s characters find themselves are frequently extreme, they
are also intensely and closely imagined, and Wagner’s mastery in
tracing their developments and interconnections is such that, in the
right hands, his works emerge as penetrating exercises in spiritual
cartography. 5) A certain unembarrassability. It is difficult to charac-
terize this quality exactly; but the critic must be willing (and able) to
deal seriously and honestly with such unzeitgeisty themes as, e.g., in-
nocence, the sacred, redemption, purity, penitence, etc., and to do so
not only without irony or condescension, but with conviction.
There. I’ve just described Roger Scruton. (Scruton on the radio:
oddly diffident delivery, supremely intelligent content that only he
could have delivered without blushing.) And in this book he’s at
his considerable best. I cannot hope here to do justice to everything
that he accomplishes: the book is short, but no page is without its in-
sights, and the cumulative effect is of something far larger. I can,
though, attempt to give a hint of its conclusions by putting it into dia-
logue with Wagner’s one-time disciple and first important critic,
Friedrich Nietzsche. This is not how Scruton himself proceeds,
but I think that it might be helpful.
Nietzsche had a problem with Parsifal. Wagner, he wrote, ‘sud-
denly sank down helpless and shattered before the Christian cross’.
The ‘whole counterfeit of transcendence and the beyond,’ he says,
finds ‘its most sublime advocate in Wagner’s art’; and his ‘last
work’ – i.e. Parsifal – ‘is in this respect his greatest masterpiece.’
This claim – or charge, as Nietzsche thinks of it – is an understand-
able one, given the symbolism with which Parsifal is saturated, and
the idea that the work is fundamentally Christian in spirit has
endured (it receives its best and most sympathetic expression in
Lucy Beckett’s 1981 book, Richard Wagner: Parsifal). Nietzsche
also has a more specific objection. The ‘preaching of chastity,’ he
says, ‘remains an incitement to perversion: I despise anyone who
does not regard Parsifal as an attempt to assassinate ethics’. Again,
and again unsurprisingly, this idea – that in Parsifal the composer
of Tristan not only renounces, but demonizes, the world of the
flesh – has had staying-power.

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Scruton’s book does a great many things, many of them wonder-

fully well; and one of these is to show, quite decisively, that
Nietzsche was wrong about Parsifal, both in general and in particular.
That Parsifal should have been taken for a Christian work is, as I
have said, easy to understand. The ‘Redeemer’ is mentioned fre-
quently; its two big set-pieces, at the ends of Acts I and III, are
Eucharist-like rituals featuring the Holy Grail and, in the latter
case, the spear that pierced Christ’s side on the cross; the participants
in these rituals resemble communicants in many important respects;
and the drama’s eponymous protagonist is likened at one point to
Christ himself. But, as Scruton insists,
the creator God is invoked only in passing, and never as an object
of worship or prayer. Much is said about the Redeemer, but
nothing about the place whence he came or the place to which
he has departed. The ritual, superficially so very like Holy
Communion, emphasizes courage, action and renewal, rather
than (as in the Church’s litany) sin, confession, repentance and
redemption. (p. 10)
Indeed, Parsifal’s ethos, ‘which leads him to take on burden after
burden, and to venture into the world of sin and despair, is clearly
a way of engaging with life rather than a way of avoiding it’
(p. 102). And while, from the ritual over which he presides in the
final scene, there is certainly ‘a benefit sought by the Grail’s devo-
tees’, ‘it is a benefit here and now’, not one ‘founded on the hope
for eternal life’ (pp. 114–15). There is, in short, nothing of
Nietzsche’s ‘transcendence and the beyond’ in all of this, and such re-
demption as is on offer is a human affair from start to finish (‘the most
striking feature of the Redeemer,’ Scruton writes, ‘is not his real pres-
ence at the altar, but his real absence from the lives of those who call to
him’ (p. 17)). And Wagner makes this very clear. In the ceremony, the
blood in the Grail is transformed into wine – that way round – and
this is a reversal that, as Wagner’s wife, Cosima, noted in her diary,
‘permits us to return our gaze refreshed back to earth, whereas the
conversion of wine into blood draws us away from the earth’.
If there is a religious vision here, then, it is a thoroughly immanent
one – awash with Christian symbolism, no doubt, yet insulated not
only from Christian metaphysics but from Christian aspirations as
well. Nor, as Scruton shows, is that vision to be aligned instead
with Buddhism or Schopenhauerianism, as some have thought,
since for both of these redemption consists in a form of self-extinction
(nirvana, will-lessness), in a ‘condition in which there is no self to be’
(p. 110). In Parsifal, by contrast, selves are redeemed to be the selves
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that they are, and are redeemed, moreover, by other selves. The vision
in Parsifal is thus a counterpoint to the (paradoxical) individualism of
those who would abolish the self; and redemption consists not in
escape from the world and others, but in entering into what Scruton
calls ‘right relations’ with them. In this sense, there ‘is a kind of
deep acceptance of the human condition laid before us’ in Parsifal.
Rather than lure us away from the world, as the Christians would,
or from ourselves, as the Buddhists and the Schopenhauerians
would, ‘the music invites us to come home to what we are’ (p. 91).
Scruton reaches this conclusion by way of a sustained and brilliant
interrogation of Kundry’s failed seduction of Parsifal in Act II. It is
here, where – as in the corresponding Act of Die Walküre – the think-
ing is at its grittiest, the music at its least alluring, that he locates the
heart of the drama. And what he finds there is not Nietzsche’s
‘preaching of chastity’, but a vision of human relations in their
‘right’ and ‘wrong’ forms. Kundry fails, essentially, because she is of-
fering the wrong thing to the wrong person for the wrong reasons.
Parsifal is able to resist her, essentially, because his temptation
allows him to grasp – in a searing moment of empathy – how the
Grail King, Amfortas, who went before him and who could not
resist, has come to suffer such unassuageable torment. The dramatic
details are complex, played out as much in the orchestra as on the
stage, and Scruton unpicks them compellingly, showing how,
throughout this fateful encounter in Klingsor’s enchanted garden,
opposites coalesce, melt into one another and spark one another to
life. Here he is in one of the book’s finest summations:

Remorse, grief and desire sweep on to the stage in rapid succes-

sion; the longing for purity is eclipsed by the need to destroy it;
sexual excitement gives way to immortal longings, which in turn
become lust for this mortal body here and now; cries of repent-
ance are quickly succeeded by eager invitations to sin and remem-
bered traumas become implacable demands for sexual pleasure.
But all these extremes are threaded on to the toughest musical
cord, which runs unbroken from Kundry’s first words to her
final cry at the end of the Act. The music weaves together the
sacred and the desecrated, the pure and the polluted, the giving
and the refusing. We hear the holy as it changes to the unholy
and yet remains the same. Such enharmonic changes of the pas-
sions are delivered by the enharmonic language of the score, and
the uncanny sense of unity between all that we hope for and all
that we fear is in the end what Parsifal is about. ‘You know
where you can find me,’ says Parsifal – namely, in you. (pp. 52–53)
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This is no ‘attempt to assassinate ethics’. Rather – and in a way that is

not so very distant from Nietzsche’s own efforts, in The Anti-Christ,
to reclaim Christ from the Church and to turn him back into some-
thing human – it is part of a wider endeavour to imagine ourselves un-
alienated, whether from our selves, from the world or from each
other.
When we ‘come home to what we are,’ as Scruton has it, we do so
because we have entered into ‘right relations’ with others. And what
are they, these ‘right relations’? Or, to rephrase the question, what, in
Parsifal, does ‘redemption’ mean? Here things become thornier.
Cosima once noted that ‘Parsifal has nothing in common with any
Church, nor indeed with any dogma’; and that would seem to be
the right thing to want to say. But how far did her husband agree
with her? As Scruton reads him, perhaps not quite far enough.
There is, he says, a ‘residual Christianity’ in Parsifal, an element of
‘the Gospel message’ that remains once ‘all theological commitments
have been subtracted from it’ (p. 108); and this is to be found in what
Wagner calls Mitleid (to be translated here, I think, as ‘compassion’
rather than ‘pity’), an idea that Scruton unpacks as a variety of
agapē, the ‘love that gives but does not take’. ‘For Parsifal’, he
writes, ‘the goal is to rescue the other, by taking on the other’s suffer-
ing and so existing all the more fully in this world, straying, strug-
gling, bewildered, but guided by love’ (p. 110).
Perhaps so. Yet what Parsifal in fact says, as he reaches his goal and
rescues Amfortas from his torments, is ‘Be thou whole, redeemed and
healed! / […] Blest be thy pains, / that the holy strength of Mitleid /
and most pure might of knowledge / gave to a feeble fool!’ He doesn’t
mention ‘love’ once in the third Act. Indeed, he seems to identify his
redemptive powers exclusively with the Kraft of Mitleid and the
Macht of knowledge, powers that fit naturally together if we think
of Mitleid as compassion and of knowledge as what that feeling-
with reveals. But perhaps this doesn’t greatly matter. Regardless of
what does the redeeming, Mitleid or agapē, there is still the worry
that, as Scruton puts it, neither is sufficiently ‘existential’ to play
the role assigned to it, that either ‘may seem more like an accidental
tie, a relationship of good will that is offered equally to the stranger
and the friend’ (p. 110). The worry, to put it in slightly different
terms, is that ‘the residual Christianity’ that Scruton refers to
imparts to Parsifal’s variety of redemption a degree of impersonality
and categoricity that takes it dangerously close to just the sort of
‘dogma’ that Cosima warns us not to expect or to find.
Scruton wrestles with this issue manfully, and his reflections,
which seek to introduce the ‘existential’ into materials that are apt
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to resist it, are rich and absorbing (pp. 111–23). These reflections are
also, however, summary-defying. So here I’ll pursue a slightly differ-
ent tack – one that is fully implicit in Scruton’s book, but which he
himself perhaps thought too obvious to be worth spelling out.
In a fascinating discussion, he follows the Greeks in distinguishing
‘chronos time’ – ‘time in its regular character, measured by the
moments as they tick away’ – and ‘kairos time’ – ‘composed of
cruxes’ at which ‘the world takes a new turn: the arrow finds its
target, the shuttle leaves the hand, the kiss touches the cheek’. All
true myths, he says, ‘are attempts to narrate human life as though it
takes place in kairos time rather than chronos time’. Parsifal is, or at-
tempts to be, a myth in this sense. To succeed, such attempts must
transform events that genuinely do or might take place in chronos
time, and distil or intensify them so that ‘the veil is lifted and
another dimension of being is revealed to us’ (p. 13). This is only pos-
sible, however, when what is ‘revealed’ is really there: revelation is
factive, and the lifting of a veil can only show us what is there to be
shown behind it. One respect in which such attempts might fail,
then, is for their would-be revelations to be, not distillations of
genuine human possibilities, but fantasies of what is humanly
possible.
This gives us another way of stating the worry mentioned above,
that redemption in Parsifal is insufficiently ‘existential’, as Scruton
has it, or, if we use Cosima’s terms, that it comes too close to
‘dogma’. Restated, the worry is that Parsifal’s version of redemption
strives for a kairos moment but delivers only a fantasy, a fabrication of
what redemption, for us, could possibly be.
Stated thus, however, I think the worry is quite easily assuaged –
and is assuaged, moreover, by the very music of redemption that
Scruton refers to in his subtitle. Take the music away, and the
Grail ritual with which Parsifal concludes may indeed seem fantas-
tical. In reaching for what we might call Finality (a kairos quality:
in chronos time there are only cessations or respites) one may feel
that it misses its mark, that its resolution is a fabrication, not some-
thing that could feature in any human life, however intensified. But
now listen to the endless modulations leading to the final, radiant
A-flat major chord. It’s final, all right – it brings the work to one of
those glowing conclusions of which Wagner was the master – but it
is not Final. The music could just as easily have modulated again
and ended in E-flat major, or again and found itself in B-flat, and
the effect would have been exactly the same, just as radiant, just as
final. And what this signals is that the redemption that we are witnes-
sing is a conditional, provisional redemption (as Scruton remarks at
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one point, the modulations tell us that the whole story could simply
start back up again: we are firmly in the world of human possibility
here). The kairos moment with which Parsifal closes, then, is not
of Finality but of Respite, of the drama’s having finished for now.
But there will be other Klingsors, even other Kundrys.
Anyway, I must make a finish of my own (or, perhaps better, a ces-
sation). Wagner’s Parsifal: the Music of Redemption is a splendid book.
It fully occupies its title, too: nobody with an interest in Wagner,
Parsifal, music or, indeed, redemption should miss it.

Aaron Ridley
amr3@soton.ac.uk

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