manipulates his musical motifs, key relationships, and orchestration to communicate subliminally to his audience deep veins of emotion which Wagner’s characters can’t express in words. Scruton provides some wonderfully provocative and poignant illustrations of Wagner’s gift in adding this other, deeper dimension to his drama. I’ve not attempted such a close musical analysis of specific passages because I can’t read musical scores, but I’ve no doubt my study will be greatly enhanced someday through the good offices of an independent musical scholar (perhaps in collaboration with me) with the requisite musicological credentials and a profound familiarity with Wagner’s Ring, who'll undertake such a difficult task. What I’ve done, however, unlike virtually any other commentator, is trace the most far-reaching implications of Wagner’s employment of his 193 (more or less) musical motifs to cross-reference both themselves and his libretto text, to, if you will, create another level of meaning parallel to the drama, which, with sufficiently close analysis, can disclose its deepest secrets.
In the following passages Scruton attempts to describe my allegorical interpretation, in which Siegfried is construed as an artist-hero who falls heir to Wotan’s (dying religious faith’s) legacy when Wotan is forced to withdraw from the world, but suggests, again, that it’s only applicable to an early Feuerbachian conception of Siegfried which Wagner outgrew as the deeper implications of his music-drama compelled him to alter his original conception, though he credits me with having shown that “… it is possible to develop a far-reaching interpretation of the cycle in its finished form from Feuerbachian premises.”:
“… consciousness works always against the religious doctrines, sowing the seeds of doubt and undermining the divine authority. In these circumstances it is given to art to rescue the deep truths about our condition, to present them in symbolic form, and so to bring about a new order in the human soul, free from illusion but true to the distinctiveness and sacredness of the human condition.” [P. 185-186]
“There is strong evidence that Wagner originally conceived the story of Siegfried in this way and, as Paul Heise shows, it is possible to develop a far-reaching interpretation of the cycle in its finished form from Feuerbachian premises. (…)
This hero … must also be an artist. He is the spirit of poetry itself… . (…) Just as poetry stands in need of music to create the art-work of the future, so does the hero stand in need of the loving bride, who has come down from the world of religious illusion into the sphere of mortals, there to unite with him in the action that will liberate the world.” [P. 186]
“However, that story is moving in a direction that Feuerbach would not have countenanced. Feuerbach saw the liberation of mankind as a political event, a total transformation of the social and economic order, in which we would win through to freedom as the scales of religious illusion fall from our eyes. Wagner was already seeing that liberation occurs, if at all, only in the individual soul, and that it is not achieved alone but through loving union with another.” [P. 186-187]
Scruton is mistaken in his assumption that my interpretation is a priori constrained by “Feuerbachian premises” in which the seat of all significant action is a political transformation of society predicated on scientific debunking of religious faith, when in fact I stated in a multitude of
