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Redemption from the Redeemer? Review Article on Roger Scruton and Wagner’S ‘Parsifal’ Jeremy Coleman

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Redemption from the Redeemer? Review Article on Roger Scruton and Wagner’S ‘Parsifal’ Jeremy Coleman The Wagner Journal, 15, 1, 50–60 Redemption from the Redeemer? Review Article on Roger Scruton and Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ Jeremy Coleman Wagner’s Parsifal has the curious honour of being the subject of the final book by Roger Scruton, philosopher, composer, novelist, doyen of English conservatism and one of the most prolific public intellectuals in the UK of the last fifty years, who died in January 2020.1 Not long before, Scruton sent his publisher, Allen Lane, the manuscript of Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’: The Music of Redemp- tion, which appeared in May 2020 (hereafter WP). That Wagner’s music dramas occupied a significant niche within Scruton’s thought was already evident from two previous books: The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wag- ner’s ‘Ring of the Nibelung’ (Allen Lane: London, 2016) [hereafter RT]; and Death-Devoted Heart: Sex and the Sa- cred in Wagner’s ‘Tristan und Isolde’ (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2004) [hereafter DDH].2 But precisely Roger Scruton poses next to what these works meant to him remains as enigmatic as his portrait by Lantian D at the music drama that is the subject of his final book. The the Mall Galleries, 2016 present review article focuses on WP but with reference to RT and DDH for comparison and context, and aims to consider the following questions in a critical, non- polemical vein: What lay behind Scruton’s long-term love of Wagner? Can his philosophical engagement with Wagner’s works be understood as a single, coher- ent project? What is the legacy of his Wagner criticism? And how might we come to terms with it today? 1 I am grateful to Max Erwin, Jan Czarnecki and Férdia Stone-Davis for their helpful comments on previous versions of this article. 2 See also Roger Scruton, Chapter 9, ‘The trial of Richard Wagner’, and Chapter 10, ‘A first shot at The Ring’, Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation (London and New York, 2009), 118–30 and 131–61 respectively. 50 Redemption from the Redeemer? Review Article on Roger Scruton and Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ In WP, Scruton confronts the ethical and philosophical riddle posed by this notori- ous work, arguing that Parsifal, above all the music, provides an answer to nothing less than the riddle of human nature.3 For Scruton, Parsifal powerfully expresses complex ideas of sin, sacrifice and redemption so central to Christian theology but in a way that divests them of their specifically religious form. Chapter 1, ‘The Quest’, sets out the basic story and themes of Parsifal by way of introduction. The title perhaps re- fers to Scruton’s own ‘quest’ in the book as well as that of the titular protagonist and the universal search for forgiveness and resolution thematised in the work. Chapter 2, ‘Wagner’s Treatment of the Story’, at over forty pages the longest chapter in the book, surveys the literary, religious and mythological sources for Wagner’s drama and his process of adaptation, interspersed with detailed interpretation and analysis. Chapter 3 (‘Confronting the Enigma’) and Chapter 4 (‘Sin, Love and Redemption’) elaborate on ideas introduced in Chapters 1 and 2, focusing on selected moments in the drama, and the book ends with two further chapters, one on the music and the other consisting of an annotated list of musical motifs. Why Parsifal? Not only is Wagner’s final work the subject of Scruton’s final book, but it may be the Wagnerian drama that comes closest to resembling Scruton’s own image as a public figure and what he stood for: after all, Parsifal is a work preoccupied by the idea of a dying tradition and an (all-male) community, dealing in a provocative mixture of sacred and secular phenomena, and outwardly dominated by the character of austere religious ritual. In addition, it may well be Wagner’s most dialectical work, an aspect that clearly fascinated Scruton, although he opted for terms such as ‘para- dox’ (WP ix, 6, 19, 46) and ‘union of opposites’ (WP 58, 59) that might be less obviously marxisant than ‘dialectic’. WP returns to topics that Scruton had previously explored in relation to Tristan und Isolde: sexuality and love, eros and agapē, transcendence and free- dom, self and other, the duality of the human subject. But in WP, as the subtitle of the book tells us, Scruton also addresses the mother of all Wagnerian themes: redemption. He traces the idea back to its theological roots in Christ’s suffering on the cross but asks what redemption might mean in a secular world. In Scruton’s words: One of the many puzzles presented by Parsifal lies here: what is meant by redemption, when judgement and reward have no real part in it? To answer that question we must explore the deep questions of philosophical anthropology raised by Wagner’s drama, and also resist the temptation to interpret the opera in such a way that the question does not arise. (WP 67) Scruton’s engagement with Wagner’s works, especially with Parsifal, suggests an ambivalence towards religion partly echoed by Wagner himself. Somewhere in each book Scruton quotes the famous opening of Wagner’s essay ‘Religion and Art’ (1880) as emblematic of his own interpretation of religion: It is reserved to art to salvage the kernel of religion, inasmuch as the mythical images which religion would wish to be believed as true are apprehended in art for their 3 Previous reviews of WP include: Colin Clarke, ‘Roger Scruton’s Final Word on Parsifal’, Rhinegold Publishing (29 May 2020), <https://www.rhinegold.co.uk/opera_now/roger- scrutons-final-word-on-parsifal/> (accessed 1 Dec. 2020); and Daniel Johnson, ‘A Path Open to Us All’, The Critic (Jun. 2020), <https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/june-2020/a-path-open-to- us-all/> (accessed 1 Dec. 2020). 51 The Wagner Journal Volume 15 Number 1 symbolic value, and through ideal representation of those symbols art reveals the concealed deep truth within them (quoted in DDH 7; RT 40; WP 9).4 Wagner’s statement, reflecting a mythological interpretation of religion, conversely supports Scruton’s general call to resacralise art for a supposedly disenchanted secu- lar society. It also resonated with Feuerbach’s critique of religion as the alienation of properly human powers, a critique which had influenced the Ring, as Scruton himself previously noted in a sympathetic discussion of Feuerbach’s idea (e.g. RT 23–4, 185–6). Wagner’s greatest works, in other words, show us the way to reappropriate those pow- ers for humanity and thereby to redeem humanity itself from the sins of modern life. Despite this broad meeting of minds, there are moments when Scruton’s conservative humanism (religion as ‘cultural’ value) sits uneasily with Wagner’s in-your-face appro- priation of Christian iconography and ritual in Parsifal, as in the following passage: in Wagner’s drama that doctrine [the doctrine of transubstantiation] is reduced to a metaphor. The ‘love-feast’ celebrated at Monsalvat is about solidarity here and now, not life beyond the grave, and the most striking feature of the Redeemer is not his real presence at the altar, but his real absence from the lives of those who call to him, as Amfortas calls to him in vain. (WP 17) By suggesting (with touching Anglican diffidence) that the doctrine of transubstantia- tion in Act I may be ‘reduced to a metaphor’, he seems to deny the element of theo- logical mystery, transformation and almost posthuman otherness at the heart of the work. Nonetheless, Scruton’s larger point of emphasising the significance of religion in Parsifal as a kind of purely human, cultural practice is valid. To complement this approach in WP, he draws catholicly on various fields including the anthropology of religion, notably René Girard’s work on sacrifice, violence and ritual (WP 96–7) and Mary Douglas’s ethic of pollution and taboo (WP 71, 80). Some of the tensions around the idea of the sacred were already apparent in DDH as well as in the book’s colourful reception history. The book made an impression on the composer James MacMillan during the composition of his opera The Sacrifice as well as his St John Passion (completed in 2006 and 2007 respectively), both of which incorporate musical quotations of Tristan und Isolde. By all accounts DDH moved Mac- Millan to interpret Tristan und Isolde in sincerely religious terms and therefore to take it as a model for his own composition.5 But in view of Wagner’s radical appropriation of religion for mythological humanist ends, or rather Scruton’s admiration of that idea, it seems MacMillan overlooked the careful ambiguity in Scruton’s argument.6 In WP, as in his previous Wagner books, Scruton is clearly motivated by the con- temporary (which is to say timeless) significance of Wagner’s works and the view of 4 Cf. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, tr. and ed. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols. (London, 1892–9; facsimile repr. 1993-5); vi. Religion and Art, 213. Scruton cites Ellis’s translation when quoting these words in WP, but the translation he quotes (WP 9) differs substantially from Ellis’s, suggesting that Scruton tacitly modified it. 5 I am grateful to Phillip Cooke for pointing this out to me. See Dominic Wells, Chapter 2 ‘Sacrificial Passions: The Influence of Wagner and Scruton in James MacMillan’s The Sacrifice and St John Passion’, Contemporary Music and Spirituality, ed. Robert Sholl and Sander van Maas (Abingdon, 2016), 37–52. 6 A similar point is made by Dominic Wells (note 5), 43–4. 52 Redemption from the Redeemer? Review Article on Roger Scruton and Wagner’s ‘Parsifal’ ‘human nature’ expressed in them.
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