Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption, by Roger Scruton
Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption
By Roger Scruton
Allen Lane £20
Wagner’s final music drama has had surprising admirers and unsurprising detractors.
Stravinsky loved the music, hated the stage business. Debussy, while ridiculing the drama, called it ‘one of the most beautiful edifices of sound ever raised to the imperturbable glory of music’. For Nietzsche, it was ‘a work of deceit, vindictiveness, a secret attempt to poison the premises of life’.
But for the late Roger Scruton it was an integrated masterpiece whose narrative complexities were clarified by the music. As a philosopher, a perhaps unorthodox churchgoer and a musician, he was well placed to assess that relationship. This short, densely woven, sadly posthumous book is the valuable result.
It’s easy enough to make fun of Parsifal, and some are still shocked by its religious apparatus, notably its celebration of the Mass on stage. The Knights of the Grail, guardians of the spear that pierced Christ’s side on the cross and the sacred chalice that caught his blood, have fallen on hard times. Titurel, their ‘king’, is old and ailing. His son, Amfortas, suffers from an agonising, unhealing wound dealt him by the sacred spear the sorcerer Klingsor stole when Amfortas yielded to the charms of the mysterious Kundry in Klingsor’s magic garden.
It is the task of the ‘pure fool’ Parsifal – ‘made wise through compassion’, as the Knights’ favourite prophecy has it – to rescue and make sense of this confusion. But compassion is slow a-coming, since Parsifal finds the situation as hard to grasp as the average audience member. He must endure the same ordeal as Amfortas in the magic garden, and must resist.
At the very centre of the central act, Kundry attempts to seduce Parsifal, as she once seduced Amfortas. But at the first touch of her lips, Parsifal experiences Amfortas’s wound in his own heart and cries out for the Redeemer. Enlightened, he returns to the land of the Grail, heals Amfortas with the recaptured spear and takes over as king.
Such a bald outline admittedly cheapens the story by reducing it to lurid pantomime. Kundry is something more than Klingsor’s sex slave. She is also a servant to the Grail, a reincarnated figure who laughed at Jesus on the cross and has spent two millennia seeking redemption.
Her attempted seduction of Parsifal is one of the most psychologically nuanced scenes in all opera, and with music to match, in Wagner’s richest vein of chromatic harmony, relieved by a kind of hymn-like radiance that sets Parsifal apart from all his other music dramas.
Scruton’s discussion of this scene, and the scene in the last act where Parsifal reappears in Grail-land on Good Friday and experiences Nature’s glowing response to ‘the fair trace of the Redeemer’, show him at his best as a thinker who understands the deep connections between conflicting desires of the body and the soul.
But he is also good on aspects of the dramaturgy that might not strike the casual listener. He notes that, in this opera about redemption, the Redeemer himself is missing. He came once, was here for a time and then went away – nobody knows where to. Parsifal is a modest substitute, whose sole task is to reinvigorate the Grail community, from which it seems the rest of us are excluded.
When we first encounter it, it is a harsh, unfeeling place. Titurel is dying; Amfortas is in agony and his appeals for mercy fall on deaf ears. Meanwhile Kundry, torn between service to the Grail and slavery to Klingsor, wanders the earth in search of salvation. Redemption can be theirs; but, as for us…
In the end, after all, this is a drama of character, not a spiritual tract, and it’s the music that counts. Scruton had the technical equipment to talk penetratingly about how the music works in dramatic terms, but – perhaps precisely for that reason – his main chapter on this aspect of the work will be hard going for the ordinary reader, for whom plain description might have been more helpful than in-depth analysis.
More useful, probably, is the detailed listing of leitmotifs, the recurrent musical themes that form Wagner’s vocabulary of reference to the people, objects and symbolic concepts that populate his score.
It’s easy to deride this obsession with what Debussy called Wagner’s visiting cards. But, as a way of getting a grip on his sometimes remorseless musical language, they are as good a starting point as any.