Eternal Lessons from Wagner’s Last Opera By Barnaby Crowcroft
Roger Scruton finds in this 19th-century work an antidote to many of our modern society’s ills.
The publication of Roger Scruton’s Wagner’s Parsifal: The Music of Redemption is itself a thing of some historical significance. This is the last book by one of our most eminent recent philosophers, who died of cancer in January this year, about the last opera by the only composer who can also be considered a philosopher in his own right. Parsifal — which premiered in 1882 — was intended by Wagner to be his “farewell to the world.” Yet it remains one of his least accessible works — and to critics one of his most characteristically tedious.
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