How could it be otherwise for Scruton, since Siegfried, the Ring’s raison d’être, the springboard which (along with his heroine Elsa from Lohengrin) launched Wagner into his final revolutionary period which gave birth to his mature music-dramas, remains a mystery for him.
But there's one other distinction between Scruton’s reading and mine about which he didn’t remark but which is implicit in his Ring interpretation. Apart from Scruton’s incorrect assumption that my allegorical reading is only applicable to Siegfried and the Ring as a whole as Wagner originally imagined them, but not to the Ring in its ultimate meaning, and aside also from his, I think, false proposition that my allegorical reading, even if it captures a part of the truth, isn’t part of the audience’s aesthetic experience, there’s also what I believe may be the authentic key to our differences. This is Scruton’s privileging what I'd describe as Wagner’s most idealistic vision of what he wanted his Ring to mean, as opposed to Wagner’s doubts about his idealistic vision, which in my interpretation continually subvert Wagner’s idealistic longing, and consume in fact a large proportion of the Ring’s musico-dramatic substance, including how we should understand its climactic moments and Wagner’s concept of redemption. In the following passages Scruton places great emphasis on what he believes is Wagner’s signal and most authentic vision which he imparts to audiences in a performance of the Ring, a vision most fully realized in Scruton’s view by the loving, self-sacrificing relationship of Siegmund and Sieglinde, and in Brünnhilde’s decisive, all-enveloping compassionate act of self-sacrifice which brings the Ring to a close. But Scruton also, channeling my interpretation, places this idealistic vision in the context of doubt, emphasizing the hidden (repressed), materialistic prehistory which was the necessary precondition for the attainment of altruistic morality in one animal, man, which, as I’ve described, is a centerpiece of my allegorical understanding:
“… the life of the free and accountable person remains, for us, the focus of meaning … .” [P. 303]
”Loving means giving, and giving is a relation between persons, who act from the conscious pursuit of another’s interest, and by the willing renunciation of interest of their own. To reach the condition in which this kind of giving is possible, human beings had to pass through a long prehistory.
Wagner divined the truth about that evolutionary prehistory and presented a matchless summary of its psychic legacy, in the demi-gods and goblins of The Ring. (…) … he dramatized the discontinuity between the world of the moral person and the dark Eden that preceded it.” [P. 305]
“This highly personal idea of the sacred is Wagner’s great contribution to the understanding of the human condition.” [P. 270-271]
And in his following remarks Scruton offers a particularly vivid evocation of one of the primary theses on which my allegorical reading of the Ring’s plot rests, concerning the manner in which we humans (i.e., Wotan, as Wagner’s metaphor for collective, historical man during the mytho-poetic or religious phase of human history) have repressed consciousness of our animal origins and egoistic nature in order to reinvent ourselves as essentially non-contingent, sacred,
