EPILOGUE
Critiques of Finding an Ending - Reflections on Wagner’s ‘Ring’ (2004), by Dr. Philip Kitcher and Dr. Richard Schacht, and The Ring of Truth - The Wisdom of Wagner’s ‘Ring of the Nibelung’ (2016), by Roger Scruton (including my rebuttal to critiques of my online interpretation of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung at www.wagnerheim.com, The Wound That Will Never Heal, Volume One, by Dr. Kitcher and Scruton)
There are two recent and serious books on Wagner’s Ring written long after I’d completed virtually all of my own study of it, which I’d originally considered responding to in the Prologue to my published book. These are Finding an Ending - Reflections on Wagner’s Ring (Oxford Univ. Press, 2004) by Dr. Philip Kitcher and Dr. Richard Schacht, and The Ring of Truth - The Wisdom of Wagner’s ‘Ring of the Nibelung’ (Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, 2016) by Roger Scruton. However, both because Kitcher and Scruton wrote critical responses to my online Ring book (posted online at www.wagnerheim.com since 2011, and the basis of my published Ring study), and because my critical responses to their books, and their critical responses to mine, can only be grasped by someone already familiar with either my online Ring book or its published version, I’ve saved my critical responses to both their books, and to their critiques of mine, for this online Epilogue, assuming readers’ familiarity with my allegorical interpretation.
Note: In each instance in which I reference one of the Ring’s musical motifs as numbered in my revised list of 193 motifs which I employ in my newly published (Academica Press) version of my allegorical Ring interpretation, indicated by an “H” representing “Heise,” followed by the motif’s identifying number, such as H50 (Ring Motif), I provide its equivalent in Dr. Allen Dunning’s original list of 178 motifs employed at www.wagnerheim.com in this way: H50 = #51. Hashtags (#) are followed by Dunning’s numbers from his original list.
The following excerpts highlighted in boldface are drawn from Finding an Ending - Reflections on Wagner’s ‘Ring’(Oxford Univ. Press, 2004) by Dr. Richard Schacht and Dr. Philip Kitcher:
I offer kudos to Dr. Philip Kitcher and Dr. Richard Schacht for taking Wagner’s Ring seriously as a work of art with substantial philosophic implications. However, their study of Wagner’s Ring, Finding an Ending, viewed from a critical standpoint, is a target rich environment (for a much more detailed critical response to their book than that which follows, please consult my extensive, 20-part, numbered, critical review posted on 7/21/2016 and 8/6/2016 in the discussion forum archive of my website. I limit my following critique to essential points which illustrate where I believe they're in error, what their study lacks, and how my study of Wagner’s Ring makes up the difference.
