Numerous scholars, and innumerable fans and students of Wagner’s Ring, have always felt that the Ring feels as if it means much, much more than what’s self-evident to a member of Wagner’s audience after experiencing a single or even a whole multitude of performances in the theater. Audience members universally claim they're always discovering something new in it, or seeing it from a different perspective. This is the underlying reason why so many directors and producers of Ring productions drastically stretch credulity nowadays with highly idiosyncratic and provocative interpretations which strive to highlight what they speculate are topical meanings implicit in the Ring but which, in practice, generally sabotage Wagner’s infinite mythological, musical, dreamlike suggestiveness by collapsing what’s actually a wave of potentiality into a single point, a one-sided perspective, forcing the audience to experience the Ring within an impoverished, narrow, topical framework. They know that the Ring means infinitely more than any given reading or theatrical production can assimilate, but having only the vaguest ideas suggested by this or that aspect of the Ring taken in isolation, catch at straws for the sake of experimentation and originality to impress their own signature on Wagner’s Ring. I can safely venture that most fans of Wagner’s Ring, even those with frequent exposure to live performances, rarely if ever deliberate over the implications of a surprisingly large proportion of the Ring’s libretto, the ultimate motives behind much of its action, or the most far-reaching consequences which follow from innumerable cross-references between the libretto and musical motifs. In other words, much of the deeper meaning of Wagner’s Ring which my study brings to light for conscious contemplation could only be felt, but not thought, previously, though Scruton would presumably deny it was even felt, since he argues it isn’t part of the audience’s aesthetic experience.
But that's the whole point of Wagner’s Ring plot. Wagner opined that his music-dramas were a mystery to him which could confuse him as easily as a member of his audience, but he noted that through his musical motifs he granted his audience a clairvoyance like that of the artist himself, through which they could share the artist’s profoundest secret of inspiration. Wagner’s unconsciousness of the true source of his artistic inspiration he dramatized in Siegfried not knowing who he is. But Siegfried's muse Brünnhilde, his unconscious mind, knows for him what he doesn’t know, just as Wagner’s musical motifs and their cross-references with his libretto reveal meanings which presumably were unconscious even for Wagner himself. It’s no accident that Wagner once stated that the meaning of his Ring only began to dawn on him as he composed its music [646W - {12/6/56} Letter to Franz Liszt, SLRW, p. 361]. His music not only has non-conceptual meaning (if “meaning” is the right word for musical expression per se), but also subliminally and organically interweaves a huge array of conceptual elements of Wagner’s libretto together in unexpected ways which aren’t self-evident, and don’t generally rise to consciousness, but which can ultimately be construed through intensely attentive study over a long period of time, especially in our time in which those of us unable to read musical notation can contemplate performances of the Ring at will, in our home, rather than having to wait to attend rare performances. As Wagner said, his artworks exist not only as performances but as works of art to be studied [951W - {12/1/78} CD Vol II, p. 216]. It’s also no accident that Wagner offers us in Brünnhilde not only a persuasive bigger-than-life character but also confessed in private remarks made to Cosima [933W - {8/2/78} CD Vol. II, p. 128] that Brünnhilde is the embodiment of his own special kind of music, out of which his musical motifs were generated.
When Scruton faults the allegorical meaning imputed to the Ring (or discovered in it) by both myself and Dr. Nattiez as presenting an understanding of Siegfried and Brünnhilde which audience
