muse Brünnhilde grants him in her final words. But in his private email to me reproduced above Dr. Kitcher adds that their unsympathetic attitude towards Siegfried, which considers him unworthy of the musico-dramatic context of the entire Ring of which he's a part, is shared by “… thousands of Ring-goers, as well as the directors and dramaturges who wrestle with the problem of how to make Siegfried alive and sympathetic to a contemporary audience.” It would be interesting to poll a representative sample of fans of Wagner’s Ring, and of Wagner’s music-drama Siegfried in particular, on this question, but the result, whatever it is, wouldn’t alter the fact that I’ve never doubted Siegfried’s status as the greatest of heroes, assigned to him by Brünnhilde (and therefore by Wagner in his final word on the meaning of his Ring and of Siegfried in particular). My allegorical interpretation makes sense of Siegfried’s brashness, naiveté, ignorance, fearlessness (i.e., his ability and freedom to perform the redemptive act Wotan can’t perform, killing Fafner to gain possession of Alberich’s Ring and thereby temporarily neutralizing the power of Alberich’s Ring Curse), and even of Siegfried’s brutal yet unwitting betrayal of his muse Brünnhilde. Those questionable aspects of Siegfried’s character to which Kitcher and Schacht point as grounds for their assumption that Wagner intended his audience to deplore rather than admire Siegfried, as well as the few admirable traits Kitcher and Schacht grant Siegfried, are, in my interpretation, justified musico-dramatically by recognizing Siegfried as Wagner’s artist-hero, even in his betrayal of Brünnhilde, his muse of unconscious artistic inspiration.
Kitcher then offers his own brief critique of my online Ring study, complaining of my allegorical reading’s “obscurity,” and confessing “I am simply baffled by claims that Siegfried is Wotan reborn without knowledge of his identity or that Brünnhilde is his unconscious mind - and I have no clue as to how any rigorous interpreter would find evidence for these assertions. To my mind, Heise reacts to the problem by making things up ad hoc … .” You'd surmise, would you not, that Dr. Kitcher would have attempted a thorough reading of my online Ring study prior to concluding that he can’t make any sense of several of my primary insights, and that he can’t imagine how I could sustain them from the documentary evidence and through logical development of my ideas? You would be wrong: “Heise has suggested that all would become clear if I read his book. Perhaps. But I doubt it. In the time I’ve been able to devote to his work on Wagner, the murk only gets denser the more I read. I’m not encouraged to plod on in hopes of enlightenment. Possibly other readers have had better luck.”
They have. Not only have several members of my discussion forum at www.wagnerheim.com read my entire (admittedly lengthy and difficult) online Ring study, and expressed their considerable appreciation, often-times affirming that much in the Ring had remained obscure for them until my study had granted them insight, but eminent Wagner scholar Barry Millington attempted a complete reading, his mostly appreciative response to which I paraphrased in my Prologue. His one page review can be found on page 3 of the discussion forum archive at www.wagnerheim.com posted on 1/25/2017. However, it’s of the greatest import that Scruton read it in 2010, and was sufficiently impressed by it that he sponsored my website so my allegorical Ring interpretation could be made available, for free, to the widest possible public. Furthermore, he’s placed in the public domain three distinct critical reviews of it, much of which I reproduce and respond to below.
Had Dr. Kitcher troubled himself to at least attempt a thorough reading of my online Ring study that others have willingly undertaken, often to their benefit, he’d have understood that I in no way
