It may seem quixotic to take a last work as a starting point, but the reasons for this should become clear. With Parsifal, Wagner squares up to a challenge he has already presented to himself, and which he continues to pose to his successors. This work may therefore be considered to be Wagner’s own attempt at writing ‘after Wagner’ – and quite straightforwardly is his attempt to write musical drama ‘after’ the Ring.

Parsifal has generally been understood to represent the culmination of an ideological line different from that of his earlier works, perhaps, though only perhaps, with the partial exceptions of Tristan und Isolde and the later sections of the Ring. 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’. Mention of Marx is far from incidental, since Wagner is thereby achieving an emancipation from Hegel such as Marx never does. The Ring, Scruton startlingly claims, is therefore ‘not about power or money or even love; it is about original sin’.1 This nicely sets the scene for the less ambiguously Christian milieu and message of Parsifal. Nietzsche was more hostile: