performance, in metaphoric miniature, of Wagner’s Ring, which is both the product of his formerly unconscious artistic inspiration by his muse Brünnhilde, and of his betrayal of Brünnhilde and her secrets to the light of day.
In sum, after his strained effort to restore to Siegfried a musico-dramatic significance he’d striven mightily to deprive him of, Scruton, evidently unconvinced by his own tepid attempt to rehabilitate Siegfried, falls back on a lukewarm reading of him as a common failure, a loser:
“In the end we just have to accept that Siegfried is what he appears to be: not the new man or the artist-hero; not the forger of a freer world or the fitting deposer of a superannuated god; but someone who never quite grows up, an adopted child who is unable to form secure attachments, and who exists fully as a person only by moments, when the armour of belligerence falls away. (…) Conceived as a symbol of the individual’s search for self-knowledge and self-identity in a godless world, Siegfried takes on another character, and it is this other character that interests Wagner.” [P. 278]
This seems incoherent to me. The only explanation I can conceive for what appears to be a failure of nerve in the end is that Scruton doesn’t know what to make of Siegfried. One thing is certain: Wagner was never inspired to create the most profound and greatest work of musical theater in history to dramatize the trivial trials and tribulations of an adopted child who can’t make secure attachments and who never quite grows up, nor to merely memorialize Everyman’s “… search for self-knowledge and self-identity in a godless world … .” What makes Siegfried wholly unique and exalted and solely worthy to wake, woo and win Brünnhilde, is evidently lost on Scruton. He complained that G.B. Shaw’s attempt at an allegorical interpretation of the Ring as an account of a coming political revolution was simply too fragile and limiting a conceit to build a Ring interpretation on, but if that’s the case how much more so is Scruton’s inability to make anything more of Siegfried than a universal symbol of any given man’s passage through life’s predictable transitions, which is more or less what Robert Donington concluded.
Scruton’s following two observations attempting to justify his primary thesis that my allegorical reading is too far removed from what Wagner’s audience experiences in the theater to become part of their aesthetic response to it are the last ones worthy of remark:
“Feuerbach’s philosophy is at the centre, too, of Mark Berry’s allegorical vision of the cycle.” [P. 192]
“He [Mark Berry] … seems to recognize that, by the end of Götterdämmerung, the Young Hegelian who had begun work on the cycle a quarter of a century before no longer exists. But what has come to replace him? Berry’s allegory, like Shaw’s and Heise’s, peters out at this point, offering only an enigmatic stare into the void.” [P. 193]
Scruton seems to have forgotten what he’d written just a few pages before about the finale of Götterdämmerung:
“… the drama unfolds towards its enigmatic ending.” [P. 116-117]
