Parsifal as Siegfried Revisited? Paula and Edward Bortnichak examine a theory of Buddhist reincarnation in the works of Wagner

Numerous commentators on the Ring have recounted the struggles that Wagner experienced in closing his great cycle, and in resolving the complex intersecting issues of the principal characters of this immense drama. Indeed, Wagner’s quarter-century search for satisfying closure for his Nibelung project was recently the subject of a book by Philip Kitcher and Richard Schacht, entitled Finding an Ending. In The Redeemer Reborn, Paul Schofield argues that the actual conclusion of the Ring is not to be found at the end of Götterdämmerung at all; instead, it is achieved with Parsifal, where the characters of Alberich, Wotan, Brünnhilde and Siegfried are transformed, and their journeys completed or continued, in the ‘persons’ of (respectively) Klingsor, Amfortas, Kundry and Parsifal. To make this connection, the author reminds us of Wagner’s well-known interest in Buddhism, and he invokes the belief of all Buddhists in the potential for sentient beings to be reborn.