Mark Berry, Is it Here That Time Becomes Space? Hegel, Schopenhauer, History and Grace in ‘Parsifal’

Richard Wagner’s final drama, Parsifal, has generally been understood to represent the culmination of an ideological line very different from that of his earlier works, with the exception of Tristan und Isolde and possibly the later sections of Der Ring des Nibelungen. The revolutionary of the Dresden barricades in 1849 has finally sold out to the quietism of Schopenhauer and/or to Christianity – or, which amounts to the same thing, he has at last cast off the folly of his radical youthful flirtations. Thus Roger Scruton posits a ‘transformation of the Ring story, from young Hegelian beginnings to a quasi-Christian or at any rate Schopenhauerian end’, in which ‘we witness a process of growing up in Wagner for which there is no equivalent in Marx’.