members uninstructed would be unlikely to ever experience on their own, Scruton neglects the obvious fact that not one, but two members of Wagner’s audience, with profound experience of the Ring, did in fact independently construe the Ring as a self-referential music-drama whose allegorical subject is Wagner’s art and its place in history. Dr. Nattiez, like me, independently grasped Wagner’s Ring as the story - among other stories - of the loving relationship of the poetic-dramatist Siegfried with Brünnhilde, Siegfried’s music, which would bring to birth the music-drama, though unlike Dr. Nattiez I initially placed more emphasis on Brünnhilde as Siegfried's unconscious mind and muse of artistic inspiration than on her allegorical status as a symbol for music. Both Dr. Nattiez and myself also recognized Siegfried’s sung narrative (which he performs for the Gibichungs at Hagen’s request) of how he came to understand the meaning of the Woodbird’s song, as Wagner’s metaphor for an operatic performance, though Dr. Nattiez and I differ on what that metaphor for an operatic performance represents. I take it to be Wagner’s metaphor for the performance of his own Ring. Nattiez doesn’t.
But Scruton is correct to suggest that most members of Wagner’s audience would be unlikely to construe the relationship of Siegfried with Brünnhilde as a metaphor of the relationship of drama/words to music in Wagner’s music-dramas. I'd go further and argue that most members of Wagner’s audience for the Ring experience it in performance in the dreamlike and semi-conscious, naive way that Wagner intended, in which their reflective minds aren’t brought into play, just as I do when I lose myself in it. The allegorical meanings I claim to have discovered in the Ring are experienced subliminally in much the same way that the music is, and our nighttime dreams are, for whose meanings or origins we generally can’t account. My interpretation is in large part based on a deep-reading of libretto passages and motival cross-references which most members of Wagner’s audience evidently don’t consciously notice and couldn’t parse if they did. My allegorical interpretation began with the experience I share with all others profoundly stirred by Wagner’s Ring in performance, a sort of drunken plunging into Wagner’s ecstatic sea, but which, precisely because it was the profoundest experience of my life, left me with an undying impulse to understand what I’d felt, to launch a deep exploration and reflection after the fact, so to speak, not drunk with an immediate experience of the Ring in performance (when we shouldn’t be consciously considering questions of meaning in any case, as so many modern productions fatally attempt to force us to do), but sobered up for the sake of objective understanding, much like that state in which Siegfried found himself under the influence of Hagen’s antidote to his potion of love-and-forgetting, which granted Siegfried the ability to remember what the Woodbird had imparted to him subliminally, musically, in words.
If one were to survey a representative sample of diehard Ring fans and ask each of them to summarize the Ring and describe what it all means, this survey would produce a range of responses so disparate that it might seem audience members are each experiencing radically distinct works of art. The plain fact is that, just as with Siegfried’s incapacity to grasp conceptually what Brünnhilde means when she tells him that what Wotan thought (the confession he made to her in The Valkyrie Act Two Scene Two), she felt, and what she felt was her love for Siegfried (accompanied by the so-called World-Inheritance, or Wotan's Second Bequest Motif, H143 = #134), Wagner’s audience mostly feels the Ring but generally doesn’t think it. Wotan made Brünnhilde the repository for his confession, which he told her would remain forever unspoken in words, but that’s because, in my allegorical reading, Brünnhilde’s love, her sympathetic feeling, transmuted Wotan’s confession of his corrupt nature and guilty history into redemptive musical
