SOURCE: Steinberg, Michael P. “Music Drama and the End of History.” New German Critique 69 (fall 1996): 163-80.

In the following essay, Steinberg appraises Parsifal as a cultural and ideological text concerned with the crisis of modernity and the redemption of humanity.

I. the End of Music Drama

This essay is about Parsifal. It is about Amfortas's wound, the efforts to close it, and the meaning of the claim that it has finally been closed. That closure involves also the closure of music drama, the redemption of Wagnerian form now raised to the level of pure ideology. The essay's three-part argument involves the identification of three claims of cultural resolution and their internal contradictions. These claims I will call the end of music, the end of desire, and the end of history.

On the way to Parsifal and Monsalvat, I want to rest for a moment in that scariest of...