Perhaps it is fitting that Wagner’s final opera is an operatic pilgrimage not that dissimilar to his own life. Or does it anticipate Jung and Freud? The fall into sin, if you will, is the instrumentalization and objectification of the world and humans into cogs for self-pleasure and power. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. An English National Opera production of Parsifal. He is the “innocent outsider, perhaps free from specific religious beliefs but with a heart open to the Redeemer’s message”. Comments do not represent the views of Crisis magazine, its editors, authors, or publishers. And yet from this unpromising cast and dramatic material, Scruton convincingly suggests that Parsifal is not so much an infection corrupting its listeners as an antidote to our ills – even in the 21st century. Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption, By Sir Roger Scruton, Allen Lane publisher, May 2020, 146 pages. It is an invitation to live differently in this world, and so to find redemption through our own efforts, and without the help of a God.” While this is true concerning Wagner’s specific message, Scruton also highlights through Wagner’s Parsifal that the composer-philosopher nevertheless relied extensively on those truths contained in the Christian religion concerning redemption through new relational living. The world lost a tremendously important voice on January 12, 2020, when Sir Roger Scruton passed away. Sex, for Scruton, has long been the fraught nexus of the erotic and the sacred, an existential zone wherein if you’re doing it right you exalt the other, but if wrong, embark on mutually assured pollution. No profanity, ad hominems, hot tempers, or racial or religious invectives. Is it essentially Christian? Into this crypto-Christian bedlam, strolls our eponymous hero, a Siegfried-like simpleton, making his entrance slaughtering a swan for kicks. No wonder some critics have seen Kundry as serving not just Klingsor but Wagner’s hidden sexist agenda. Wagner’s Parsifal, as Scruton makes exceedingly clear, draws principally from Christianity but also Schoperhauerian Buddhism to construct a stirring tale of a foolish knight confronting sin and temptation and redeeming the dying and decadent world falling apart around him. The Grail is brought out and opened. Here he wrote that the sensuousness of Wagner's last work made it his greatest masterpiece: In the art of seduction, Parsifal will always retain its rank - as the stroke of genius in seduction. © Copyright 2020 Crisis Magazine. It took Wagner’s patron “Mad” King Ludwig to broker a deal whereby Levi conducted without getting baptised first. Eros, in Parsifal, must ultimately be rejected. That said, this short book is a bracing corrective to Nietzsche’s account of the opera. In some productions of the opera, a dove is lowered on a string to hover above Parsifal’s head as the music swells to a conclusion. Matters get even stranger in act three in which Parsifal, after years of wandering, returns to Montsalvat on Good Friday, now a fully fledged grail knight. Can We Stop It in Time? Parsifal, however, breaks with that original path Wagner was walking. Of all kisses in the operatic canon, this must be the most semiotically dense, sexually weird, not to mention hopeless. The conflict, then, that Parsifal wrestles with is to live life in this world rather than hope for a life in the next. Keep it brief. Roger Scruton convincingly shows us why Parsifal is the music of redemption. Kundry washes his feet and he baptises her. How could such an educated and erudite humanist be such a backward-looking conservative? He is also a Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative and Associate Editor at VoegelinView. His lifelong obsession with so dubious a character as Wagner may seem symptomatic of Scruton’s own poisonous conservatism. The life-hating curse on the senses that was his last opera. Scruton had taken a wrecking ball to the idolatrous pantheon of the modern university and was scorned because of it. Richard Wagner, Ever since the young Nietzsche fell under his spell, Richard Wagner has been catnip to philosophers – and the fathoming of his elusive final masterpiece Parsifal is … Amfortas’s wound was caused when a self-castrated magician called Klingsor seized the Holy Lance and stabbed him with it. In Klingsor, the Spear is desired for its instrumentalization and de-humanizing capabilities for power and destruction. Not so much a curse on the senses, then, as an enchantment of them. In doing so, Scruton recycles some of his favourite themes, namely the difference between the sacred and the profane, sexual pollution and the redemption desperately needed by our spiritually degenerate society. In his 1998 book On Hunting, Roger Scruton defended the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable. All comments may be removed at the moderators’ discretion. Scruton does not hide the more obtuse and grotesque side of Wagner, but he does point out the problems with our zeitgeist and politicized readings of Wagner and how it misses the true artistic genius and raison d’être of Wagner’s musical projects. The Cross, the Crescent, or the Swastika? Providing basic historical and cultural context, an explanation of the principal symbols, characters, and story arc without the pollution of ideologically-driven criticism, and a lucid and compelling analysis of the opera’s music and leitmotifs, readers of all stripes will find something compelling and insightful contained in its pages. At the heart of Wagner’s opera, this book suggests, is the idea that our real task as humans is to take on the burden of another’s suffering without any expectation of reward. His lifelong obsession with Wagner may well seem symptomatic of Scruton’s own poisonous brand of elegiac conservatism. In the hands of Parsifal, however, it becomes the healing instrument of our redemption through compassion, which mends all wounds and restores all relationships. In Wagner’s … Redemption, here, comes through the healing ethic of Christianity but has very worldly purposes. “Parsifal,” he snarled in the essay “Nietzsche Contra Wagner”, “is a work of perfidy, of vindictiveness, of a secret attempt to poison the presuppositions of life – a bad work.”. What gives? Crisis Magazine is a project of Sophia Institute Press. So at least argued Nietzsche, who damned Wagner’s Parsifal with the histrionics only a former devotee can muster. Scruton notes that Nietzsche rejected Wagner on the grounds that the heroism in his operas are a romantic sham. Scruton reminds us of the importance of the ambiguous allure Christianity had for Wagner (especially later in his life), “Wagner does not stand at a distance from the worldview of his characters. Amalie Materna as Kundry, Emil Scaria as Gurnemanz, Hermann Winkelmann as Parsifal at the premiere of Parsifal in Bayreuth, 1882. What are we to make of this? Parsifal is an enigma to many, as Scruton points out, with critics divided as to how to interpret the operatic story.

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