Having committed their book to perpetuating this catastrophic error (while evidently remaining wholly unaware and therefore innocent of their exegetical character assassination of Siegfried), it’s no wonder Kitcher and Schacht also innocently committed the following atrocities, atrocities owing to their ignorance of the allegorical role Siegfried and Wagner’s other heroes from his mature music-dramas, and even in some of his earlier operas, played in his developing Weltanschauung. Their following remarks demonstrate that they simply don’t know what they’re talking about:
“… it must be admitted that a good deal of the first two acts of Siegfried could be condensed (if not simply dispensed with) without great loss.” [P. 192]
“… we have given dramatic precedence to the earlier parts of the tetralogy, spending considerable time on Rheingold and Walküre. (…)We recognize that our approach might seem to give insufficient attention and weight to what transpires in much of its last two parts.” [P. 192]
In other words, thanks to their obliviousness to the essential and persistent part the archetypal artist-hero Siegfried and his variations Tristan, Walther, and Parsifal play in Wagner’s revolutionary, mature music-dramas, they’ve largely resigned themselves to only being able to make sense of the first two parts of the four-part Ring. Significant portions of the last two parts they regard as expendable. Such is the virtue of their vaunted piecemeal approach. In my allegorical reading, by contrast, Siegfried, and the last two of the four parts of the Ring in which he plays a leading role, are fully integrated into my comprehensive, conceptually, dramatically, and musically unified reading of the Ring, which also has the virtue of demonstrating crucial conceptual links to all of Wagner’s other canonical operas and music-dramas.
But Kitcher and Schacht, to their credit, seem in the end to have suspected something is amiss, to have had some reservations in having too readily demoted Siegfried. Here, for instance, they note that in Siegfried’s final moments he reaches for the kind of “self-awareness” that might have redeemed him in their eyes:
“… it is only in his final moments that he starts to become humanly interesting as a character. After the hunt, after he has drunk from the cup prepared by Hagen, after he sings of his youth, and at last is able to recall his discovery of Brünnhilde and the beginning of their love, he seems to be on the verge of a self-awareness hitherto lacking.” [P. 188]
As I explained in my online Ring book, Siegfried in his last lucid moment becomes aware of who he really is, Wotan reincarnate, and it’s this remembrance of things past, the rise to consciousness in Siegfried of the fatal knowledge which Wotan had repressed into his own unconscious mind by confessing it to his daughter, his “Will” Brünnhilde, which destroys Siegfried, because his virtue, his creative fearlessness as an artist-hero, required that his true source of inspiration remain hidden from him. The secret of his artistic inspiration had been kept for him by his muse of unconscious inspiration Brünnhilde, who protected him from this fatal self-knowledge until he betrayed her by giving her away to Gunther (metaphorically, to Wagner’s audience), and thus became too self-conscious to be able to draw on unconscious inspiration any longer. This, I’ve demonstrated, is essentially the plot not only of Tristan and Isolde, but also of Tannhäuser (in which the artist-hero,
