their attempts at interpretation, though Scruton goes the extra mile beyond Kitcher and Schacht in his attempt to posit a partial rehabilitation of Siegfried.
This misunderstanding arises in large part, I suspect, from their having incorrectly assigned Siegfried status as either a generic hero (Kitcher and Schacht), or, in Scruton’s case, as Wagner’s Feuerbachian social revolutionary (a role Wagner assigned instead to Siegfried’s sympathetic, compassionate, socially conscientious and heroic father Siegmund). As they suggest, Wagner did indeed outgrow his original intent to construct an epic music-drama out of the fate of a hero who was destined to right the wrongs of this world, but, as I’ve demonstrated, Wagner dramatized his repudiation of this futile dream that a social revolutionary could redeem man from corruption in Wotan’s repudiation of his son Siegmund. Siegmund’s son Siegfried, allegorically, is another matter altogether. He's Wagner’s metaphor for himself, the mortal, secular artist-hero who falls heir to the profound sentiment (man’s universal longing for transcendent value) underlying dying religious faith (the legacy of Wotan and the gods of Valhalla) when that faith can no longer be sustained in the modern world. It's at least partly for this reason, I think, that Scruton denies that the Ring (at least in its ultimate meaning) can be understood as an allegory, and therefore denigrates my allegorical approach:
“Wagner’s treatment of this story [the Ring] is … replete with musical symbolism … . … symbolism is not the same as allegory, even if allegory is a form of it. In allegory a story is told in which each character, each object and each action stands for something else - usually a universal concept - so that a narrative of concrete episodes forges a connection between abstract ideas. … in an early and highly influential commentary Bernard Shaw gave an allegorical reading of the Ring cycle. More recently, in one of the most thorough accounts of The Ring to date, Paul Heise has defended a comparable allegorical interpretation, aligning the characters and actions of the drama with forces at work in forging civilization from the raw material of nature. Heise derives his allegory from a close reading of the philosophy of Wagner’s early mentor Ludwig Feuerbach, as well as from the text and music of The Ring and Wagner’s own voluminous writings. The allegory is spelled out carefully … .
Heise’s allegory does, I believe, contain a core of truth: but it is a truth about The Ring as Wagner originally conceived it. The Ring as it finally emerged tells a rather different story, and tells it not through allegory but through a kind of concentrated symbolism that admits of no simple stepwise decipherment.” [Scruton, P. 10]
Scruton has introduced here his thesis (though without yet having noted specifically that it’s based on Wagner’s supposed outgrowing of his original intent to make Siegfried the dramatic centerpiece of his entire Ring), which he shares with Kitcher and Schacht, that Siegfried, the original raison d’être for his Ring, was an initial inspiration from Wagner’s earliest days in conceiving an epic music-drama (the late 1840’s and early 1850’s) which would later evolve into the four-part Ring of the Nibelung, in which Wagner left his original conception far behind. Scruton suggests that any allegory I’ve discovered at work in the Ring concerns, at best, that early Feuerbachian conception which Wagner allegedly outgrew as his musico-dramatic and philosophical insight gradually cast Siegfried into a subsidiary role, and brought Wotan and his daughter (and Siegfried’s lover) Brünnhilde to the fore as the Ring’s dramatic pillars. Scruton here also introduces his notion that my allegorical reading is somehow distinct from and antithetical to “… a kind of concentrated
