ABSTRACT
V ariously described as sublime, vicious or merely decadent, Richard Wagner' s Parsifal has always fascinated critics who have seenit either as a 'superior magic opera' which 'revels in the wondrousn or as a 'profoundly inhuman spectacle, glorif}ring a barren masculine world whose ideals are a combination of militarism and monasticism' .3 Mo re soberly i t has been described as a work with an 'underlying insistence on assent to a truth outside itselt.4 Y et it is preciselythe nature of that truth that has been the subject of unending controversy. Is the work's central theme really the 'redemption of an Aryan Jesus from Judaism', as Germany's arch antiWagnerite, Hartmut Zelinsky, thinks i t is?5 Can Parsifal be interpretedas a Christian work at all, militant or otherwise? Or is it just a benign, and rather feeble millenarianist fantasy-a kind of Armageddon cocktail with large twists of Schopenhauer and Buddha?
