invent any of my allegorical readings of the Ring’s protagonists and dramatic incidents ad hoc, but draw them instead from an exceptionally close and consistent reading of the primary documentary evidence in the Ring’s libretto and its web of associated musical motifs, and also from a thorough assessment of secondary documentary evidence drawn from Wagner’s relevant writings and recorded remarks, as well as from the writings of Wagner’s mentor Ludwig Feuerbach which demonstrably influenced Wagner. Furthermore, I develop my allegorical readings in a gradual and careful way, from simple to complex, vetting each element of my allegorical reading of protagonists and dramatic incidents step by step based on the documentary evidence. This is self-evident to anyone who penetrates beyond my Prologue into my presentation of the main arguments of my interpretation.
Since Scruton, unlike Dr. Kitcher, did undertake a serious reading of my online Ring study, I reproduce below key excerpts both from Scruton’s Introduction to my website (2011) and from his concurrent article The Ring of Truth (published in The American Spectator in 5/2011) without commentary, as they provide necessary context for excerpts I’ve also reproduced below from Scruton’s subsequent critique of my allegorical interpretation of Wagner’s Ring in his book The Ring of Truth - The Wisdom of Wagner’s ‘Ring of the Nibelung’ (2016), in which, to a considerable extent, and somewhat surprisingly, he faults as vices what he describes in the two comparatively positive reviews of my online Ring book as its virtues:
Excerpts from Scruton’s Introduction to my website, posted there in the spring of 2011:
“(…) Heise shows that the influence of Feuerbach is indeed all-pervasive in Wagner’s music drama. But he also shows that the Ring is concerned with far deeper and more lasting questions than those raised by the discussion of property and revolution. The drama touches on aspects of the human psyche that are hardly acknowledged in the writings of 19th-century socialists. Briefly put, The Ring, on Heise’s interpretation, is an exploration of man’s religious sense, of the human need for the transcendental, and of the hope for redemption that endures even in our time of cynicism and materialist frivolity, and which can be satisfied, now, only through the truthful enchantment conveyed to us by art.
In developing that theme Heise has made, it seems to me, one of the most important contributions to Wagnerian scholarship that we have seen. As yet his work takes the form of a scene-by-scene analysis of the whole drama, in which the symbolism of the motives and the allegorical meaning of the action is minutely dissected. In making it available in this form, Heise has opened his ideas to public discussion, and made it possible for fellow Wagnerians to question them, to amplify them and to contribute to the kind of debate that is surely needed, if this great work is to take its proper place at the centre of modern philosophy and at the centre, too, of modern life.
(…) … on Heise’s reading: The Ring is about the death of religion – not the old Germanic religion only, which, in the Icelandic sagas, foresaw its own demise, but all religion. (…)
