Excerpts highlighted in boldface from Roger Scruton’s book The Ring of Truth - The Wisdom of Wagner’s ‘Ring of the Nibelung,’ published in June, 2016, by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books:
Let me begin by noting that Scruton’s new book on Wagner’s Ring, The Ring of Truth, doesn’t remotely attempt the kind of comprehensive survey of the musico-dramatic content of all the scenes in Wagner’s Ring that I did, but instead, like Kitcher and Schacht in Finding an Ending, interrogates the Ring piecemeal with specific questions of interest to him, while ignoring a huge proportion of its words and music. Scruton omits from consideration hundreds of passages from the Ring’s libretto and motival cross-references, including many of those libretto passages and motival cross-references on which I built my interpretation carefully over a period exceeding fifty years. But a comprehensive approach like mine is in fact the only way to say anything definitive about the Ring, unless we assume, as some do, that the Ring isn’t unified or conceptually coherent. On the one hand, one can construe Wagner’s Ring to mean anything one pleases if one merely cherry picks passages from the libretto and/or music which best illustrate a given theme or point of view, while ignoring huge swaths of the music-drama which can’t be assimilated to such a small-bore approach. On the other hand, taking on the burden of proposing an interpretation only if it can make sense of Wagner’s Ring as a whole, in detail, as I did, is a much harder yet wholly necessary task, and can only be accomplished if Wagner’s Ring is indeed conceptually and musico-dramatically coherent, from beginning to end. By insisting on assessing it as a whole, omitting nothing of importance, I was able to demonstrate its conceptual and musico-dramatic coherence and unity, an achievement which brought to light dozens of insights which would otherwise have remained hidden, and solved many old Ring conundrums. It was also only through this comprehensive approach to Ring exegesis that I was able to unearth and present for consideration its numerous conceptual links with Wagner’s other canonical operas and music-dramas, many of which had previously escaped notice. In sum, Scruton’s interpretation, though full of insight and profoundly attentive to some of the Ring’s most characteristic virtues, and containing wonderful illustrations of Wagner’s employment of his musical motifs in particular and musical expression in general to enhance the drama as Scruton interprets it, can only be construed as a definitive assessment of the Ring’s ultimate meaning if we don’t place Scruton under obligation to assimilate numerous passages from its libretto and music (particularly motival cross-referencing with the drama) which he neglected, but on which any serious attempt to interpret the Ring as a whole must turn. I suspect that if Scruton had tried to assimilate them to his more narrowly defined interpretation, they would in all likelihood have presented severe stumbling blocks.
Aside from Scruton’s having omitted from discussion a huge proportion of the Ring’s libretto and motival cross-references, a problematic flaw in Scruton’s otherwise - in many respects - superb study, a disadvantage which he shares with Kitcher and Schacht, is his incorrect assumption that Wagner outgrew his original raison d’être of the Ring, his hero Siegfried, in the course of writing and composing it, and demoted him to a dramatically and philosophically less significant status than that of Wotan and Brünnhilde (a thesis Scruton also shares with Kitcher and Schacht). In the following pages I’ll show how Scruton made this crippling mistake because (like Kitcher and Schacht) he failed to grasp Wagner’s allegorical logic, though, as you’ll see, unlike Kitcher and Schacht, Scruton is more alert to this possibility. Neither Kitcher and Schacht nor Scruton have a clue what Siegfried represents, or who he is, and are unable to incorporate him meaningfully into
