Parsifal: an opera beyond redemption?

December 14, 2025

Parsifal: an opera beyond redemption?

This is a modified excerpt from my Schopenhauer, Wagner (3): Parsifal, Screaming, and the Metaphysics of Dreams.

Richard Wagner’s last opera Parsifal is a dubious, pseudo-Christian work. The stage action contains the representation of Christian rituals (primarily, the Communion); but at the same time it is a ritual, or aspires to be – what Wagner called a ‘stage consecration festival’ (with an ugly fourfold compound noun, Bühnenweihfestspiel).

The problem that Parsifal poses is encapsulated, in nuce, in the final three words, sung by the choir of knights and novices: “Redemption to the Redeemer” (Erlösung dem Erlöser). That formula may sound intriguing, with its suggestion of infinite regress (quis custodiet custodes?). What it forces upon us is the question who this Redeemer is, from what he is or should be redeemed, and also, whether this redemption is something admirable.

The theme of redemption is a constant element, even an obsession in Wagner’s oeuvre. It assumes various forms: redemption from the worries of everyday life, from loneliness, from sex addiction, from the lust for power. There is nothing necessarily religious in this; but a religious undercurrent is discernible at least since the late 1840’s, and it comes to the fore during the long period of Parsifal’s gestation, eventually taking the form of an obnoxious, irrational ideology of racial ‘regeneration’. The controversy this provokes is unlikely ever to end: whether Wagner’s ideological writings are merely a runaway commentary on his work, that can be dismissed as merely one interpretation (and not one of the best); or whether they contain the explicit formulation of what is contained implicitly in the work itself.

Since the epithet ‘Redeemer’ appears several times in the text with clear reference to the life and death of Jesus Christ, the answer to the first question – who is this Redeemer – may seem obvious. Nevertheless, one could argue that by speaking only of “the Redeemer” or “the Saviour”, never using his name, Wagner intends to avoid the direct identification with Jesus Christ both as a historical figure and a Christian deity – as if any resemblance to real beings, mortal or eternal, were coincidental.

Scruton’s Parsifal

That is not the opinion of Roger Scruton, whose last published book is one of the staunchest recent defences of the opera on ideological grounds.¹ Like so many fervent Wagnerians before him, he holds the view that we must distinguish between the artwork itself and whatever else its creator may have said or done, and judge the work on the basis of what we discover in it. In his odd formulation, “The artist’s own life is as likely to be an impediment as a stimulus to the creative endeavour, and in any case must be insulated from the creative process” (p. viii). The choice of words is odd, because this splendid insulation from life seems to apply not only to the work and our interpretation, post facto; it even seems to be imperative upon the artist himself in the process of creation. If any artist adhered to this, it certainly wasn’t Wagner.

Despite this barrier between work and life, Scruton has no fears of what literary critics call the Intentional Fallacy: throughout, he speaks as if he has privileged access to Wagner’s mind and intentions. His rendering of those intentions is however selective and sanitised, omitting much of what the Master himself has said about them; it is, in fact, an attempt to ‘redeem’ the work from the sins of its creator. In this way, Scruton manages to recommend Parsifal as the allegory of a half-secularised religion, based on an ethics of ‘purity’, ‘sin’, ‘sacrifice’, ‘suffering’ and ‘salvation’ – the ethics of a wishfully conservative, sophisticatedly naïve latter-day cultural Christian.

For Scruton, the opera’s Redeemer “is clearly the Christ of the Gospels, construed not as an incarnate Divinity but as an exemplary human being” (p. 108). One could argue that precisely this construal already contradicts the Gospels. In any case, this Redeemer figures in the opera only as someone who is spoken about. Whatever fictional identity he has within the drama depends on what the actual characters believe, in addition to what we can surmise about their fictional world (which may actually contradict their belief). As Scruton notes, the religious belief of the characters in Parsifal differs from Christian dogma in that it lacks the concept of eternal life. Instead, we are dealing with the decidedly unchristian doctrine of reincarnation, which in this fictional world seems to be a reality, although it applies only to one character, Kundry. The fictional belief system does not lack (as Scruton claims) a belief in the Redeemer’s divinity: he is repeatedly identified as ‘God’. And regardless of what the characters believe, there seems to be a deity at work behind the scenes, steering the events, punishing sinners, and enforcing prophecies and curses.

If we solve the riddle of the opera’s last three words on the basis of the direct context of the work itself, it is the Christ-like, unseen Redeemer who is saved from the “guilt-stained hands” of the Grail community leader Amfortas. In this sense, those words simply confirm the fact that Parsifal has fulfilled the demand that, as he claims in the second act, was made of him by the Redeemer himself:

I hear the Saviour’s lament, his lament, alas! for the sanctuary that was betrayed: “Deliver me, save me from guilt-stained hands!” Thus God’s lament (die Gottesklage) resounded with terrible force in my soul.

That Scruton misreads this passage (p. 118) – as if the cry were not uttered by the Saviour himself, but either by the Grail, by the temple or the spear – is significant, because it is precisely these words that point toward the racial ideology that lurks in the background, the background that he prefers to ignore.

‘Blood’

What Scruton gets right about Wagner’s intentions is that Parsifal is not a harmless work of fiction, but a (pseudo-)Christian work of art; even, in the composer’s words, “a most Christian work of art”. What that meant to Wagner was not an allegiance to any church or mainstream religious belief, which for him represented the corruption of Christianity. His deeper intentions could in private be hinted at with an air of esoteric wisdom:

“I know what I know, and what is in it [Parsifal]; and the new school, Wolz[ogen] and others, can stick to that”. He then hints at, rather than expresses, the content of this work, “Redemption to the Redeemer” — and we are silent after he has added, “It’s good that we’re alone”. (Cosima Wagner’s Tagebücher, 5 January 1882).

However, as a letter to this Hans von Wolzogen makes clear, “what is in it” is no great mystery: it is his vision of a supposedly historical Jesus, stripped of his traditional Jewish and Christian background, “the truly recognised, incomparably sublime and simple Redeemer in the historically concrete figure of Jesus of Nazareth, purified and redeemed from all Alexandrian-Judean-Roman despotic disfigurement” (17 January 1880).

Nor did he keep this doctrine private. It is expounded quite openly in his essays of the 1880s, and this has established Parsifal’s reputation as an unredeemably racist work – a view that Scruton calls “a kind of orthodoxy” (p. vii), which should be challenged by dismissing such ideas as irrelevant biographical circumstance.

According to those essays, ‘regeneration’ should be the remedy for the supposed current ‘degeneration’ of humanity. To this end, Wagner links the allegorical Jesus to the historical figure through an obscure notion of ‘blood’. Degeneration is caused by mixed, that is, polluted ‘blood’; regeneration is possible through the blood shed by the crucified Jesus, which symbolically stands for his compassion. The actual ‘blood’ of Jesus cannot be that of any race (although Wagner was particularly opposed to the idea that it could be Jewish). It has come into being precisely as a result of racial degeneration. This exerted pressure on the Schopenhauerian ‘Will’, the creative force behind all phenomena. It is the reaction force of this ‘compressed’ Will, which produced the ‘divine blood’ of Jesus.

To ask where in this ‘theory’ metaphor ends and metaphysics begins would be useless. Precisely this lack of distinction seems to characterise the thought process that produced such ideas.

The discussion sometimes gets bogged down in the question of whether Wagner’s antisemitism is expressed in the supposed Jewishness of this or that character. The argument tends to be circular. Wagner associated Jews with certain malicious personality stereotypes (such as cunning egoism). It does not follow that wherever we encounter evil in Wagner’s operas, the evil-doer must represent Jewishness. It is true, though, that Wagner tended to reduce the problems of society to a supposed Jewish problem; but if we see Jewishness wherever evil is at work in his operas, we become entangled in precisely that kind of thinking in racial categories. From that point of view, Wagner’s oeuvre ought to be rejected in toto, ignoring whatever artistic quality or power of fascination it may have. If resisting racism implies the freedom to think outside such categories, such a total rejection would effectively be a capitulation to the racist frame of mind.

Cultural Christianity

It was Wagner’s intention to establish something like a cultural Christianity, a non-institutionalised religion without god or dogma, whose “profound truth” is clothed in artistic metaphor. What he achieved in the last years of his life comes close to that – it comprises a cult with a temple (Festspielhaus), ritual (Bühnenweihfestspiel), doctrine (racial regeneration) and a community of faithful around himself as its saintly leader.

Regardless of whether Scruton’s interpretation is appropriate to the work, I find nothing admirable in its cult of sacrifice, suffering and salvation. And when we consider how this philosopher allowed his name to become a bra nd in Orbán’s Hungary, we see how easily nostalgic, utopian conservatism can slide into something like fascism – just as easily as happened with Wagner’s legacy.

Is Parsifal redeemed by its music? Many present-day listeners may have little difficulty in appreciating Bach’s St Matthew Passion for its musical qualities, without bothering much about its religious content and cult of suffering (although personally I find it hard to completely eliminate such concerns). But Parsifal is a work for the stage. It cannot possibly be staged ‘authentically’, for both ideological and aesthetic reasons; if we were to follow all of Wagner’s stage directions, the result would be abominable religious kitsch. Nor should we stage it against itself – this can only result in persiflage (and the disapproval of such Regietheater is one thing I can concede to Scruton). In my opinion, regardless of how I may feel about the music, the opera’s religious symbolism, ritualisation and sacred pretence defeat it as a work for the theatre.

Fortunately we can engage with it nowadays without the embarrassment of a stage performance: Wagner’s often-quoted joke about inventing an ‘invisible theatre’ deserves to be taken more seriously than he intended.