“My description of Brünnhilde naturally leads to the question of Siegfried, a character so manifestly conceived as a symbol that no other interpretation seems to make sense of him. … Siegfried is … a problem, and indeed for some people an insuperable obstacle to any sympathetic approach to Wagner’s drama … .” [P. 231]
“Siegfried was the subject of the drama as Wagner originally conceived it, when he sought to rewrite the old Nibelungenlied as an allegory of the modern world. Siegfried was to represent the free individual, who overthrows the old and corrupt order of society, but falls victim to the machinations of power.” [P. 276]
Having already effectively conceded that my allegorical approach makes considerable sense of the gods and other non-human protagonists in the Ring, introduced primarily in the first part of the four-part cycle, Scruton now seems to have thrown in the towel by acknowledging that Siegfried, a mortal human being, one of the two primary characters who dominate the last two parts of the four part Ring, may also only be comprehensible as an allegorical, or symbolical, being. As we’ve seen, Scruton has attempted to obviate the “problem” of Siegfried by consigning him to the status of a virtual ghost, a residuum from Wagner’s alleged original conception of the Ring drama as a Feuerbachian allegory which Wagner outgrew. But I’ve already debunked his proposition in my critique of the similar position taken by Kitcher and Schacht, who were oblivious to the fact that Wagner continued to experiment with variations on the allegedly defunct Siegfried in Tristan, Walther, and Parsifal.
That Scruton also seems unaware of the implications of Siegfried’s allegorical links with Wagner’s prior opera heroes and subsequent music-drama heroes can be seen in his remark that his following critique of Siegfried makes him (whom we’re supposed to acknowledge as Wagner’s archetypal hero) problematic:
“Worst of all … is his [Siegfried’s] enthusiastic agreement to the plot to capture Brünnhilde and to force her into a situation from which his father would have rushed to rescue her.” [P. 276]
As I pointed out previously in my discussion of Kitcher’s and Schacht’s Finding an Ending, Wagner stated in his Epilogue to ‘The Nibelung’s Ring’ that in this respect the plots of Twilight of the Gods and Tristan and Isolde are identical. If Siegfried is problematic in this respect then so is Tristan, who under apparently (but not actually) outside influence agrees, like Siegfried, to abduct his own true love Isolde to force her into marriage with another man (in Tristan’s case after having killed her fiancé Morold - Siegfried’s equivalent being his killing of Fafner, who had to be killed in order to access Brünnhilde). What Scruton evidently lacks is an understanding of the allegorical meaning of this action in Wagner’s entire oeuvre: it’s Wagner’s metaphor for the formerly unconsciously inspired artist-hero unwittingly and involuntarily exposing the secret of his unconscious artistic inspiration to the light of day, in what should have been a redemptive work of art which would have concealed its secret. This is the natural consequence of Alberich’s Ring Curse, the curse of historical man’s inevitably increasing consciousness, which over time necessarily acquires such a hoard of objective knowledge of man and Nature that all self-deceptive forms of consolation in religious faith, altruistic morality, and inspired secular art can’t sustain
