with all that had gone before, Wagner’s plotting of the tragic destiny of the two Wälsung heroes remained central to his ultimate conception of the Ring’s meaning. Wagner’s four-part Ring began its life, after all, in what eventually became the last of its four parts, originally called Siegfried’s Death but only later called Twilight of the Gods. Therefore, Scruton’s following argument that Wagner’s original conception of Siegfried’s role as the prospective emancipator contradicts what Scruton incorrectly describes as Wagner’s subsequent, “incompatible vision” of Siegfried’s transgression in betraying this hoped-for redemption, strikes me as inaccurate:
“Wagner’s initial conception, which saw Siegfried as the emancipating hero who was to break the bonds of an old and moribund authority, gave way to another and quite incompatible vision, in which Siegfried is the true transgressor, the one who, by failing to understand the meaning of promises, contracts and laws, brings about his own and others’ destruction. (…) … in destroying the gods, we destroy a large part of ourselves.” [P. 193]
I don’t think that Siegfried’s allegedly “… failing to understand the meaning of promises, contracts and laws … “ has anything to do with the case. Just as Kitcher and Schacht proved themselves unaware of the Ring’s wider conceptual context in Wagner’s other canonical operas and music-dramas (which I’ve shown are allegorically linked to the Ring in a multitude of ways which have a bearing not only on how we should understand it but how we should understand them in light of the Ring and each other), so Scruton is also missing this key to interpret Wagner’s allegorical language. Had he surveyed the character Siegfried in a wider Wagnerian context he’d have recognized, as I did, that the artist-hero Tannhäuser in his involuntary betrayal (as Wagner said, as if under a spell) of the secret of his formerly unconscious artistic inspiration (his secret sojourn with his muse Venus in the Venusberg, which he’d forget on waking to create a work of art) to his audience in the Wartburg, is the basis not only for Siegfried’s unwitting and involuntary betrayal of Brünnhilde by giving her, his own predestined love, away to another man (Gunther, Wagner’s metaphor for Siegfried’s audience), but also for Tristan’s betrayal of Isolde by giving her away to another man, his uncle King Marke. In other words, when Scruton’s description of Siegfried’s transgression as being incompatible with Wagner’s original vision of Siegfried as the emancipating hero is translated into the terms of my allegorical reading, it would be correct to say, as Scruton does, that Siegfried’s original role as artist-redeemer is incompatible with Siegfried’s later role in which he betrays Wotan’s hope for redemption, but it would be incorrect to say that Siegfried’s two antithetical roles are incompatible with Wagner’s wider historical conception of an inevitable progression or evolution in consciousness or self-awareness, or with Siegfried’s nature as an artist-hero in modern times. Scruton simply hasn’t grasped the conceptual coherence behind Siegfried’s seemingly antithetical roles, which are entirely compatible in my allegorical interpretation when seen in historical context.
In my allegorical interpretation the formerly unconsciously inspired artist-hero (the condition in which he remains so long as he stays true to his muse-lover, the heroine Brünnhilde) is predestined (under the sway of Alberich’s Ring Curse of consciousness, through which man gradually grows more and more self-conscious while accumulating a hoard of knowledge of man and Nature) to eventually betray the secret of his unconscious artistic inspiration to the light of day, specifically by presenting his greatest work of art (Wagner’s Ring) to his audience. This was what Alberich meant when he told Wotan that his hoard of Nibelung treasure would eventually rise from the silent night to the light of day and overthrow the gods, and that Alberich would suborn Wotan’s
