This book, completed just before his untimely death in 2019, concludes 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 received, arguing, among much else, that its protagonists must be regarded 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 answered 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 compositional 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, 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 adjustments and often radical transformations seldom fail to repay attention. 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 characterize this quality exactly; but the critic must be willing (and able) to deal seriously and honestly with such unzeitgeisty themes as, e.g., innocence, 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 insights, and the cumulative effect is of something far larger. I can, though, attempt to give a hint of its conclusions by putting it into dialogue 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, ‘suddenly 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 understandable 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.

Scruton's book does a great many things, many of them wonderfully 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 frequently; 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,

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 devotees’, ‘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 redemption 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 presence 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 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 thinking 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 offering 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:

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 something human – it is part of a wider endeavour to imagine ourselves unalienated, 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 suffering and so existing all the more fully in this world, straying, struggling, 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 to resist it, are rich and absorbing (pp. 111–23). These reflections are also, however, summary-defying. So here I'll pursue a slightly different 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 attempts 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 possible, 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 fantastical. 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 something 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 witnessing is a conditional, provisional redemption (as Scruton remarks at 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 cessation). 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.