Their entire enterprise is fatally flawed from the start because they pride themselves on attempting to parse the Ring in only a piecemeal and partial way, by interrogating it with a few questions of interest to them, rather than striving for a comprehensive approach which, as I’ve demonstrated, is necessary to grasp the Ring in both its totality and its innermost depth:
“Philosophers coming to the Ring can strive for an interpretation of it, endeavoring to capture in discursive prose what Wagner somehow managed to suggest and convey in his music drama. Or, more modestly, they can try to bring into focus some key concepts and relate them to aspects of the tetralogy. We think of our efforts here in the latter way … .” [P. 7]
“Our approach will be somewhat different from those usually encountered in discussions of the Ring. Our principal reason for approaching it differently stems from a conviction that broad-brush treatments illuminate very little of the substance, complexity, and subtlety of some of the most interesting issues dealt with in the course of its 15 or so hours … . (…) Instead of staking out a general claim about the overarching meaning of the work, we shall try to focus on some of its most puzzling facets, using these as clues to finding a path through it.” [P. 8-9]
Because they hadn’t the fortitude to tackle the Ring, music and drama, as a whole, and in any real detail, and therefore ignored large swaths of its words and music, and evidently regard this vice as if it’s a virtue, they couldn’t make sense of Wagner’s key character Siegfried, in spite of Wagner’s having conceived of his Ring in the first place as an explanation of Siegfried’s death (as they themselves acknowledge in our first of two extracts below). For this reason they denigrated the last two of the Ring’s four parts, those in which Siegfried plays a role, namely, Siegfried and Twilight of the Gods, as being of lesser value than its first two parts, The Rhinegold and The Valkyrie. In the following passages from their book they rationalized their incapacity on the specious argument that Siegfried is a character whom Wagner outgrew as the Ring expanded from its original music-drama Siegfried’s Death into the musico-dramatic tetralogy we know today, in which, according to them, Wotan and his daughter Brünnhilde have supplanted Siegfried’s original pride of place, demoting him to a comparatively minor role:
“But what about Siegfried? Our excursion through the Ring has consistently downplayed his significance; and much of what we have said about him is dismissive … . Yet we are well aware that the entire Ring grew out of Wagner’s original intention and effort to write and compose a single music drama that was to be entitled Siegfrieds Tod [Siegfried’s Death]; and it is undeniable that large chunks of the Ring seem to be devoted to his anticipation, his youth, his adventures, his fearlessness, his ardor, and the events surrounding his demise. How, then, can we say so much about other characters and so little about the apparent star of the whole show?” [P. 185]
“He is immensely important to the action in the second half of the Ring .… . Yet it is a strain to analyze him psychologically, or even semiotically, at anything like the same level as Wotan or Brünnhilde (or Loge, or Erda, or Alberich, or Hagen, or even Siegmund or Sieglinde) - except in terms of the inadequacies and shortcomings of what he paradigmatically represents, and of what he fatally and devastatingly lacks.” [P. 186]
