for my allegorical reading. As I’ve shown, Wagner devotes an inordinate proportion of his Ring to registering his doubt about the ideals celebrated in it, not only his doubt that such ideals will thrive, but his doubt that they, under close analysis, can even be understood to be ideals grounded in truth rather than expressions of self-delusion.
In another dramatic instance in which Scruton underestimated the explanatory power of my allegorical reading, he lauds Robin Holloway’s profound interpretation of Siegfried’s sung narrative of how he came to understand the meaning of birdsong in Twilight of the Gods Act Three, Scene Two (a performance prompted, ironically, by Siegfried’s nemesis Hagen) as “ ‘the farthest-flung arc of memory-architecture ever achieved in music’,” without, however, acknowledging that in my online Ring book I described Siegfried’s sung narrative of how he came to understand the Woodbird’s song as Wagner’s play-within-the-play, Wagner’s metaphor for the performance of his own Ring before an audience (Gunther and the Gibichungs standing for Wagner’s audience):
“In a remarkable essay, Robin Holloway has summarized the musical and psychological effect of this passage [Siegfried’s sung narrative in Götterdämmerung of how he came to understand the meaning of the Woodbird’s song] … . (…)
Holloway goes on to show how this episode does not merely redeem Siegfried, by restoring his real and continuous identity, but also ties the whole tetralogy together, in ‘the farthest-flung arc of memory-architecture ever achieved in music’.” [P. 281-282]
In my allegorical reading, both Siegfried the secular artist-hero’s original role as Wotan’s hoped-for redeemer from Alberich’s Ring Curse, who, freed from the gods’ laws (from religious faith), could freely win Alberich’s Ring back from Fafner to keep Alberich from regaining its power and fulfilling his Curse (by taking possession of it aesthetically), and Siegfried’s subsequent betrayal of his muse Brünnhilde, and of Wotan’s hope for redemption, through their love, from Alberich’s Ring Curse, stem naturally from Siegfried’s true identity and fate as a modern artist-hero. Siegfried is a formerly unconsciously inspired artist-hero who in the modern world is predestined to become so self-conscious that he can no longer obtain unconscious artistic inspiration from his muse Brünnhilde. Wagner dramatized Siegfried’s inevitable betrayal of his role as artist-redeemer allegorically in two ways in Twilight of the Gods: (1) first, by Siegfried unwittingly and involuntarily betraying his muse of unconscious artistic inspiration Brünnhilde by giving her (and thus the secret of Siegfried’s inspiration she’d kept, Wotan’s confession) away to another man, Gunther (Wagner’s metaphor for his audience), under the influence of Hagen’s potion of love-and-forgetting (Hagen being Wagner’s metaphor for the modern scientific spirit which explodes our consoling illusions); and (2) second, by Siegfried, again under Hagen’s influence (including both his prompting Siegfried to tell the Gibichungs how he gained the power to understand birdsong, and his giving Siegfried the antidote to Hagen’s original potion of love-and-forgetting which made Siegfried forget Brünnhilde), singing the story of his heroic life and how he came to grasp the meaning of the Woodbird’s song, including exposing his true relationship to his muse Brünnhilde to his audience. Both Siegfried’s hoped-for role as redeemer and his subsequent betrayal of that hope of redemption were part of Wagner’s original conception, just as Wotan’s initial hope in Siegfried’s father Siegmund, and Wotan’s subsequent disillusionment regarding that hope, were also. Although Wagner’s conception of the ultimate meaning of his Ring he amended several times as he tried to decide just how he’d end it, in order to make this ending consistent
