The Wound That Will Never Heal: An Allegorical Interpretation of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung

By Paul Brian Heise

Paul Brian Heise’s The Wound That Will Never Heal is an original allegorical reading of Richard Wagner’s epic music drama The Ring of the Nibelung. Heise challenges the standard view that Wagner merely dramatizes the conflict between love and power and demonstrates instead that his greatest work is an allegory exploring humanity’s longing for transcendent value and that quest’s paradoxical establishment of a science-based secular society. By employing a more extensive analysis of primary evidence than any prior interpretation, The Wound That Will Never Heal is the first interpretation to propose and sustain a global and conceptually coherent account of the entire Ring.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Academica Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781680538144

Book preview

Introduction by Roger Scruton

The late Roger Scruton sponsored and financed the creation of my website www.wagnerheim.com as an online venue to present the entire body of my research into the allegorical, conceptual unity of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung, as a free resource for students and admirers of Wagner’s art, as well as dedicated Wagner scholars. www.wagnerheim.com went online in the spring of 2011, at which time he wrote an introduction to it which is reproduced below:

Paul Heise’s Interpretation of Wagner’s Ring Cycle

Roger Scruton

No composer has ever been more of a philosopher than Richard Wagner, and in none of his works is Wagner more philosophical than in The Ring of the Nibelung. In this work—surely the greatest drama composed in modern times—Wagner attempts to convey a picture of the human condition that will identify the origins of good and evil, the place of man in the cosmos, and the secret source of human freedom. When he wrote the poem, Wagner was under the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach, the philosopher whose materialist re-working of Hegel’s social and political philosophy inspired the early thoughts of Karl Marx. And many commentators (not least George Bernard Shaw) have seen strong parallels between the vision of the Ring and the Marxist critique of capitalism. Heise shows that the influence of Feuerbach is indeed all-pervasive in Wagner’s music-drama. But he also shows that the Ring is concerned with far deeper and more lasting questions than those raised by the discussion of property and revolution. The drama touches on aspects of the human psyche that are hardly acknowledged in the writings of 19th century socialists. Briefly put, The Ring, on Heise’s interpretation, is an exploration of man’s religious sense, of the human need for the transcendental, and of the hope for redemption that endures even in our time of cynicism and materialist frivolity, and which can be satisfied, now, only through the truthful enchantment conveyed to us by art.

In developing that theme Heise has made, it seems to me, one of the most important contributions to Wagnerian scholarship that we have seen. As yet his work takes the form of a scene-by-scene analysis of the whole drama, in which the symbolism of the motives and the allegorical meaning of the action is minutely dissected. In making it available in this form, Heise has opened his ideas to public discussion, and made it possible for fellow Wagnerians to question them, to amplify them and to contribute to the kind of debate that is surely needed, if this great work is to take its proper place at the center of modern philosophy and at the center, too, of modern life.

The text of the Ring is derived, with imaginative flair and brilliant strokes of synthesis, from old German myths that were once the theological heritage of the German people. The seamless plot of the tetralogy can be read as a retelling of the myths of a dead religion. And yet this is also the meaning of the drama, on Heise’s reading: The Ring is about the death of religion—not the old Germanic religion only, which, in the Icelandic sagas, foresaw its own demise—but all religion. The religious need is the original need—the Urnoth—of humanity itself, which arises with our conscious separation from the cosmic order. Consciousness is the human lot, and the root of freedom; but it is also the cause of our fall—and Wagner’s telling of the "Fall’ is surely a poetic achievement to match those that we know from the Book of Genesis, and from Paradise Lost.

On Wagner’s understanding, consciousness is the origin, not only of the distinction between good and evil, but of the hoard of scientific knowledge, which alienates us from our roots in species life. We long to regain the innocent oneness with the world that is the lot of animals and which was the lot of our pre-conscious ancestors. And we project that longing into the heavens, imagining there a blessed resting place where the wound of consciousness will be healed, and we will regain the serenity that we lost in our first attempts at self-understanding.

That is the theme of Wagner’s drama as Heise understands it. And in his subtle exposition he shows, one by one, how each scene of the work spells out some necessary feature of the allegory. Wagner’s work is a meditation on our condition, as spiritually needful beings, whose sparse allocation of happiness has created a lasting need for the transcendental. We seek for the transcendental in love, in power, in the accumulation of knowledge. But always it eludes us. What then is the redemption? Alberich renounces love, for the sake of the Ring, which is (on Heise’s interpretation) the spell-making and spell-deciphering power of science. And Alberich’s sin is both a sin against religion and the sin required by religion. For without science, in its elemental aspect, the illusory kingdom of the gods cannot be built or maintained. The intricate thought here, which is so difficult to grasp in plain prose, is wonderfully presented in the music and the drama of Das Rheingold, and lucidly explained by Heise in his commentary.

If we cannot redeem ourselves by renouncing love, then from whence does redemption come? Two ideas animate the subsequent dramas. The first is that we are redeemed not by renouncing love, but by renouncing life for the sake of love. The second is that we are redeemed through art, and through the artist-hero (Siegfried) who takes on the task that religion failed to accomplish. The artist-hero presents a new kind of redemption, which is the redemption of wonder. Instead of looking for vindication in the transcendental world, art shows that we are vindicated here and now, by our own capacity to recognize the beauty of the world, and to weave love and allusion into the sensory order. Which of these two forms of wisdom does Wagner recommend? Heise suggests that the two philosophies coincide: redemption through loving renunciation, and redemption through art involve the same sacrificial stance. Consciousness needed the gods, as a mirror in which to smile. Science smashed the mirror. And art replaced the mirror with a refracting window on the world, in which all the colors of our joy and suffering are harmonized. In the place of the certainties of religion and the doubts of science, art gives us wonder. Through wonder we accept the world, and this wonder is exemplified by the Ring itself. Wagner’s music shines a light of allusion and suggestion that reaches to the ends of the universe, and by showing what art can achieve, Wagner also justifies his view that art is the way in which we can live with the unhealing wound of consciousness.

Heise’s book is not an easy book. But it is a deep book. All Wagnerians know that The Ring is full of enigmas. But the enigmas are resolved by Heise in a most pleasing, intense and persuasive way. The Wanderer, Wotan’s missing eye, the Norns and their rope, the head of Mime, the many drinks brewed and refused or stored and consumed, the Ring, the Tarnhelm, the sword Nothung, the spear, the wood-bird—so many obscure seeming symbols, which become bright and transparent in Heise’s reading. I don’t agree with all that he says. But he awakens interest, argument, dissent and wonder at every point, linking the text minutely to the musical realization, and bringing this great work to life in a way that I hope you will appreciate as much as I have.

Prologue

Do We Really Understand Wagner’s Ring?

I once attended a Wagner Society luncheon at which I was introduced as the author of a new book on Wagner’s Ring to a gentleman who made me the following proposition: he said anyone trying to write a new book on Wagner’s Ring in our time was on a fool’s errand. I asked him why. He answered that everything worth saying about the Ring was said long ago. But I have a counterproposition: what if I suggest that we have only just begun to grasp the depths of meaning hidden in Wagner’s Ring, that our received wisdom on the subject of not only his Ring, but his other canonical operas and music-dramas, is a mere fragment of the meaning comprehended within his life’s work, and that our heritage of scholarship on the subject often as not throws us off the scent of true understanding! There is so much that occurs musico-dramatically in his Ring, and that he said about it, that remains mysterious for us, so many questions raised in it that most just let pass without pursuing them further, because they seem to resist comprehension.

Why, for instance, did Wagner say in his essay A Communication to My Friends that Elsa [from Lohengrin] taught him to unearth his Siegfried? Why did Wagner write to King Ludwig II that Wotan is reborn in Siegfried as the artist’s intent is reborn in his work of art, but forgotten in it? What is the significance of the fact that Alberich’s Ring Motif H17ab transforms into the first two segments of Wotan’s Valhalla Motif H18ab during the transition from Scene One to Scene Two of The Rhinegold? Why did Wagner say that the most important scene in the Ring is Scene Two, in Act Two, of The Valkyrie, Wotan’s confession to Brünnhilde? Why does Siegfried forget what the Woodbird had just told him of the use he could make of the Tarnhelm and Ring it instructed him to retrieve from the dragon Fafner’s lair as soon as he emerges from it? Why does Siegfried fear to wake Brünnhilde, and Brünnhilde initially suffer panic at the thought of consummating a loving union with him? Why do we hear the Dragon/Serpent Motif H47 at the height of Siegfried’s and Brünnhilde’s ecstatic love duet in Siegfried Act Three, Scene Three? Why did Wagner state in his Epilogue to the ‘Nibelung’s Ring’ that the plots of Twilight of the Gods and Tristan and Isolde are identical, and what consequences follow from this? These are a few of the hundreds of questions and conundrums in Wagner scholarship which remain unresolved or unexplored. What would you think if I told you that not only can each of these questions and dozens of others be solved, but solved within a coherent interpretation of Wagner’s Ring which demonstrates its musico-dramatic and philosophic unity, and that this interpretation also reveals an allegorical logic which can be applied to unlocking many of the remaining unresolved questions about Wagner’s other canonical operas and music-dramas from The Flying Dutchman to Parsifal?

Here’s my opening gambit: I propose that Wagner’s Ring is, figuratively, ‘radioactive with potential force and meaning’ which, once grasped, penetrates like a virtual X-ray inside many things that previously defied understanding, and reveals previously undisclosed wonders, perhaps the innermost secrets of Wagner’s creative inspiration. Wagner once declared that through his musical motifs he could make you, his audience, fellow-sharers in the profoundest secret of his artistic aim, an aim which he confessed was as mysterious to him as to his audience. We all who love Wagner feel that there is much more at stake in his Ring than we can ever consciously comprehend; that there is a latent power in it which always seems just beyond our reach. Feeling this since I first discovered his Ring at age eighteen, for fifty years I’ve been impelled to grasp the Ring’s secrets in a way which recalls, to me, how Marie and Pierre Curie were prompted to devote their lives to the quest for the hidden source of the radioactivity in a conglomerate of three known elements which were more than the amount that should have been generated chemically from them. It was only after years of ever more refined chemical analysis that they finally distilled that almost negligible powder of the radioactive element radium that gave birth to the explosive nuclear age.

Why, then, did I undertake this lifelong task?

The Importance of Wagner’s Ring

Richard Wagner’s four-part music-drama, The Ring of the Nibelung, can justifiably be called the Holy Grail of art criticism. It is not only the most extensive in scope of all the canonical stage-works in the Western theatrical and operatic traditions, but is arguably the most comprehensive vision of the human experience presented on any stage since its premier in 1876. It remains the single work of art which most fully expresses that angst which is the hallmark of the modern world. Its great magnitude is a tribute to Wagner’s belief that in it he was unveiling a world-myth (i.e., disclosing the essence of universal human nature, which he described as the purely-human) beneath the façade of diversity in the world’s distinct races, languages, cultures, mythologies, religions, traditions, customs, and modes of government. What it means, and how its music in general and musical motifs in particular convey this meaning, is still to be determined after more than 140 years’ effort. A key purpose of the present study is to demonstrate how completely absurd it is to treat it as just another opera, and that it can best be understood as a music-drama which expresses a unified philosophy or world-view through allegory.

The Problem

The Ring remains a mystery to this day, and is what Deryck Cooke called a problematic work (like Hamlet or Goethe’s Faust). [Cooke, pp. 12–13] Given its world-historical importance, it’s astonishing that no study has yet been produced which comprehends the entirety of the drama and its music. George Bernard Shaw’s socialist, and Robert Donington’s Jungian interpretations are universally regarded as one-sided and incomplete today, and the most serious effort to encompass the entire work in a single study, by Deryck Cooke, was left incomplete by his premature death. For the most part students and admirers of the Ring now remain content to enjoy it in the theater without troubling themselves further about any deeper meaning. It is generally assumed that it is too densely packed with a variety of sometimes contradictory meanings, on multiple levels, which are in any case largely subliminal (thanks at least partly to its music) and therefore inaccessible to reasoned discussion, to be grasped as a whole.

Warren Darcy, in his Wagner’s ‘Das Rheingold’ (1993), noting that Deryck Cooke proposed to follow Wagner’s own suggestion … that the transformation of each [musical] motif should be pursued carefully ‘through all the changing passions of the four-part drama,’ observed that unfortunately, Cooke died before he could carry out this task, and no one else has attempted it. [Darcy, p. 50] Cooke himself, speaking—in his I Saw the World End (1976)—of a particular example of the confusion Wagner caused by associating a single musical motif with two passages of text from the Ring poem which seem conceptually inconsistent, stated that "there are many others in the Ring, all of which lead away from their immediate dramatic contexts to the whole involved story, and to its complex tangle of symbols, which seem intended to bring some great revelation but has always eluded our understanding." [Cooke, p. 10] It appears, then, that much of the Ring’s meaning remains unconscious for its audience, something felt but not thought. On this subject, Michael Tanner, in his Wagner (1996), quotes Hans Keller: ‘Wagner’s music, like none other before or after him, let what Freud called the dynamic unconscious, normally inaccessible, erupt with a clarity and indeed seductiveness which will always be likely to arouse as much resistance (to the listener’s own unconscious) as its sheer power creates enthusiasm.’ To this Tanner retorts: The trouble with that highly plausible-sounding suggestion is that no one has succeeded in developing it any further, no doubt because to do so would involve independent research of a kind that musicologists are unwilling or unable to undertake. [Tanner, pp. 4–5]

The Solution

The Wound that Will Never Heal, Volume One, picks up the threads of debate where the major studies of the past dropped them, from an entirely new perspective. It is the first attempt since Deryck Cooke’s passing to provide a comprehensive conceptual interpretation of Wagner’s Ring which includes a complete assessment of its dramatic poem and musical motifs’ enhancement of the drama in unprecedented detail. It explores Wagner’s musico-dramatic meaning in a way intended to illustrate his remark to Mathilde Wesendonck that there never was another man who was poet and musician at once in my sense, and therefore to whom an insight into inner processes has become possible such as could be expected of no other. [665W—{12/8/58}] RWMW, P.78] Wagner seems to have recognized that his unique artistic insight into unconscious processes might have unforeseen, troubling consequences. As Cosima Wagner recorded in her diary, [Wagner] says that he sometimes has the feeling that art is downright dangerous—it is as if in this great enjoyment of observing he is perhaps failing to recognize the presence of some hidden sorrow. [753W—{7/27/69} CD Vol. I, p 130] How could he fail to recognize some sorrow hidden within his own work of art? This is possible because, he said, his artistic creations were to a large degree the product of involuntary, unconscious inspiration: how can an artist hope to find his own intuitions perfectly reproduced in those of another person, since he himself stands before his own work of art—if it really is a work of art—as though before some puzzle, which is just as capable of misleading him as it can mislead the other person. [641W—{8/23/56} Letter to August Röckel, SLRW, p. 357] In other words, Wagner’s Ring means much more than he could consciously grasp, in much the same way that our dreams are ours, yet come to us involuntarily, seemingly from a mysterious elsewhere. Wagner is warning us that his art contains an allegorical subtext which might be its primary level of meaning, to which his music, the language of our unconscious, points.

This study will examine this question in depth to demonstrate that Wagner’s notion that he was uniquely capable of accessing heretofore unconscious (and potentially dangerous) knowledge, knowledge of which he was only subliminally aware and therefore at risk of unwittingly revealing it to his audience (and perhaps even to himself), may provide the key to a coherent, unified understanding of the entire Ring, and even several of Wagner’s other canonical artworks.

Most Wagner scholars of both the past and present, including George Bernard Shaw [Shaw, pp. 76–78], Cooke [Cooke, p. 247], Tanner [Tanner, p. 182], and Jean-Jacques Nattiez [Nattiez, p. 275; p. 286; pp. 299–300], have assumed that the Ring has no global meaning which will allow us to grasp it as a whole on one level of interpretation. A primary task of this study is to demonstrate that though such writers have made important contributions to our knowledge of this subject, some of which have been incorporated into this study, it is possible to propose an alternative interpretation which may grant us a depth of insight into the Ring’s conceptual unity, and into its status as the conceptual framework for Wagner’s other repertory operas and music-dramas, which was previously largely unsuspected. In a private email forwarded to me by the eminent Wagner scholar Barry Millington on January 23, 2017, in critical response to his first attempted reading of my online book on Wagner’s Ring posted since 2011 at www.wagnerheim.com, he stated that though he was initially skeptical of my claim to have posited a global, unified allegorical reading of Wagner’s Ring, he was pleasantly surprised to see that my claim was not as preposterous as he had feared. You can find his brief critical response to the online version of my book in the www.wagnerheim.com discussion forum archive on page 3, posted on January 25, 2017.

To initiate you into my novel reading of the Ring, I offer a brief history of my development of this research project, from its inception in the summer of 1971 to its final incarnation as a full-fledged interpretation, posted under the title The Wound That Will Never Heal, Volume One, at www.wagnerheim.com in 2011, and now in the much briefer, user-friendly revision which you’re reading (please consult the considerably longer version at www.wagnerheim.com for more extensive consideration of the documentary evidence). My purpose is to show what distinguishes my Ring interpretation from all others.

A Brief History of My Book: The Wound That Will Never Heal

By age eighteen, in 1971, the only thing I knew about Richard Wagner was what everybody else knows: the wedding march (Here Comes the bride) from Lohengrin, and The Ride of the Valkyries, the most famous excerpt from Wagner’s Ring. I knew nothing of Lohengrin and the Ring as works for the theater. One hot summer Friday evening, my parents were out of town (Annapolis, Maryland), and one of our two Washington, DC, classical radio stations, WETA, was broadcasting what was the most curious, searching, and novel piece of classical music I had ever heard. It consisted of a series of orchestral vibrations and oscillations, rising and falling, interspersed with what sounded like birdsongs. I became acutely alert and lucid (clairvoyant), as if I had woken up for the first time. At its conclusion, I ran for paper and pencil to record the host’s naming of the piece’s composer, Richard Wagner, and the piece’s name, Siegfried’s Forest Murmurs, from Wagner’s Ring. Afterwards, the host advertised a sale of Angel Records at a book and record store on Connecticut Avenue, near Dupont Circle, for Saturday. I intended to drive to Washington, DC, in the morning to buy an anthology of Wagner’s orchestral highlights which would include my chosen piece. I felt this music was striving to give birth to words.

I arrived at the store next morning and told the manager my request. He noted I must have been very moved by this musical excerpt to drive all the way over to Washington just to obtain it and asked me what I knew about Wagner. Little or nothing, I said. He filled me in. Siegfried’s Forest Murmurs, he said, is an eight-minute-long orchestral excerpt from The Ring of the Nibelung. This four-part music-drama, requiring some fifteen hours to perform, was the most ambitious work in the entire history of musical theater. Wagner had taken approximately five years, from 1848 to 1853, to write the libretto, and took from 1853 through 1874 to compose all the music, a total of 26 years from gestation to completion (later I learned that Wagner took a break from his Ring to author and compose Tristan and Isolde and The Mastersingers of Nuremberg from 1857 to 1869). Among opera composers, in writing his own libretto he was almost unique, and the librettos of his mature music-dramas were surely the best, considered as dramas, ever penned. In order to perform this grand work, Wagner designed a special theater unlike any other in Europe (though it was patterned roughly after the amphitheaters in which ancient Greek tragedy and comedy had been performed). I was mightily intrigued. By the way, I cannot guarantee that a single thing I recorded above of the store manager’s conversation with me is precisely accurate, so much have I mythologized this foundational event in my life. But I can guarantee what follows.

He made an astounding offer: he asked me how much money I had in my pocket. I told him I had $30.00 (which in those days could buy perhaps 5 or 6 Angel records). He suggested I climb up a ladder and retrieve a big, burgundy-colored, box-set of LP records from the topmost shelf, which had evidently been gathering dust for months. It was the Seraphim (a subsidiary of Angel Records, for old classic recordings, available at a lower price) 1951 mono recording of the entire Ring, including English/German libretto, with Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting the Italian Radio Orchestra. It contained some 19 albums. He offered it to me for my $30.00, saying it would normally retail for about $120.00 or so, but since it had sat for so long without attracting a buyer he would more or less give it away to me in honor of my profound initiation into Wagner’s world.

Taking it home, I immediately fell into the bad habit of listening to a short, never-changing list of favorite orchestral passages. After some months of my wallowing in these few selections from the whole, mostly orchestral preludes to acts and interludes between scenes, my parents went away again for a weekend. So, having the house to myself, I did the experiment for the first time and sat down, libretto in hand, to follow along in English to at least a part of The Rhinegold, the first of the four Ring dramas. I had no intention of sitting for more than an hour, but hadn’t anticipated the life-altering adventure on which I was about to embark. From the opening E flat major chord, I first recognized who I truly am. Oblivious to everything else, I experienced the Ring, libretto in hand, following the entire narrative, words and music, from beginning to end, with a few bathroom and sandwich and iced tea breaks along the way. I must have sat, including breaks, for twenty-four hours. It was the signal event of my life, the most fully alive I’ve ever been, one of those privileged moments when one floats and loses touch with the ground in a complete loss of self in another’s dreamwork. I felt as though I had acquired a sixth sense, a sort of clairvoyance, experiencing felicity of this magnitude. This was the closest approximation to a numinous experience I’ve ever had, a secular version of what can otherwise only be described as a divine revelation. From that day to the present, I’ve tried to grasp the meaning of this experience for me, and hopefully for others. The book you’re reading is the culmination of half a century of unremitting labor to get inside Wagner’s creations in such a way that I can make sense of them both subjectively and objectively, as something both felt and thought. The following is my account of the high points of my quest for (self-)knowledge.

My initial impression of the Ring was that it had the most remarkable, powerful dramatic coherence, from beginning to end. Was this due, as Michael Tanner suggested [Tanner, p. 182], solely to the Ring’s well known musical unity, merely a product of Wagner’s continual development of a small number of identifiable musical motifs (most being members of specific motif families) throughout the entire drama? Or was the Ring, as I experienced it, just as dramatically and conceptually coherent as it was musically coherent, capable of being grasped as a whole? I felt the musical coherence was the product, not the cause, of the dramatic and philosophic coherence. So I undertook a deep, systematic reading of the Ring libretto, to determine to what extent a global interpretation could be applied to the Ring’s entire text in fine detail. I wrote out and strove to solve all the philosophical problems raised by the libretto and its associated music at each point. I had the repeated good fortune to discern that Wagner regularly solves all the problems he raises in the Ring, once one properly construes his allegorical language.

From the beginning, however, the fact that Wagner’s Ring is so heavily indebted to Norse and German mythology and legend as the primary source for its dramatic situations and characters (including their names) seemed an insurmountable objection to my attempt to apply an allegorical reading based on a modern mindset. I long feared this might be the case until I read Cooke’s I Saw the World End in the late 1970s. He taught me how remarkably creative Wagner was not only in selecting only those things in his sources which he could manipulate for his own purposes, but furthermore how artfully he repurposed this material until it had become entirely his own. Cooke added that whenever Wagner needed to say something not found in his sources, he merely invented it, and he did this so skillfully that it would be difficult to distinguish—without prior knowledge of the sources—the dramatic incidents Wagner invented, from those he found in his source material. [Cooke, pp. 74–131] Furthermore, I learned that though most of the Ring’s dramatic situations and characters Wagner derived from Teutonic or Norse sources, a significant number were based on situations and characters drawn from Greek mythology and tragedy and from the Bible. Wagner found such a rich treasury of material in his diverse mythological sources that he manipulated it to carry any allegorical significance he desired. He believed that through his intuitive rearrangement of his source material he was disclosing its primal, purely-human, universal significance, cutting away the chaff of history to unearth the timeless, self-generating seed that gave birth to the original, pristine myths. Wagner’s Ring could be construed as the universal master myth, a template or blueprint which embraces all possible myths, since he believed he had through a deep study of a plethora of mythological material disclosed its essence, the very nature of naked man, in his Ring.

In this way, I soon established the twelve pillars of my interpretation, which in most instances set my interpretation apart from all others. These pillars support what I’ve long believed is the true subject of the Ring allegory, that it’s Wagner’s account of human history from its beginning to its end, and that its conflict between power and love is Wagner’s metaphor for man’s existential dilemma, that we humans are torn between our quest for worldly power, attained through acquisition of objective knowledge of man and nature, as expressed in science, technology, and politics, and our counter-impulse to assert our transcendent human value, as expressed in religion, altruistic morality, and art. In this scheme, truth (the ultimate source of power), or is, is incommensurable with the good (love) and the beautiful (love), or ought. This is man’s tragedy, his ‘existential dilemma,’ our un-healing wound.

The Twelve Pillars

(1) Nature and its laws (Fate, represented by Erda and her daughters, the Norns, and our egoistic animal instincts, the Giants) are the foundation of all events and characters in the Ring, including the so-called gods of Valhalla and their proxies the Wälsungs and Brünnhilde.

(2) The Ring of power Alberich forges is Wagner’s metaphor for the power of the human mind. The Tarnhelm represents imagination (Wagner’s Wonder), and the Nibelung Hoard represents objective knowledge (its accumulation increasing the power knowledge gives us).

(3) Alberich’s accumulation of a Hoard of Treasure in the bowels of the earth (Erda) and Wotan’s (Light-Alberich’s) accumulation of a hoard of knowledge of the earth (Erda) during his world-wandering, are Wagner’s metaphors for man’s gradual acquisition of objective knowledge of man and Nature.

(4) When Alberich warns Wotan that he’ll be sinning against all that was, is, and will be if he steals Alberich’s Ring and co-opts its power for the sake of the gods (the self-deception necessary for religious faith), this is Wagner’s metaphor for religious man’s sin of world-denial, or pessimism.

(5) Alberich’s motive in placing a Curse on his Ring is to punish Wotan and his proxies (the Wälsungs and Brünnhilde) for committing the religio-artistic sin of world-denial-and-renunciation.

(6) Siegmund is Wagner’s metaphor for his Feuerbach-inspired secular social revolutionary. Having acknowledged the futility of hoping a social revolution could establish justice and truth in the world, Wagner dramatized his loss of faith in Wotan condemning his beloved son Siegmund.

(7) Since Wotan represents collective man during the religious phase of history, his confession to Brünnhilde of knowledge he can’t bear to speak aloud is Wagner’s metaphor for religious man’s repression of unbearable knowledge into man’s collective unconscious. Wotan’s confession to Brünnhilde is Wagner’s dramatization of his own turn inward towards his art, his creative unconscious (Brünnhilde), after giving up hope for redemption through politics.

(8) Siegfried is Wagner’s metaphor for man’s second post-religious bid for redemption in the inspired artist-hero, creator of the artwork of the future. Siegfried’s loving union with Brünnhilde is Wagner’s dramatization of unconscious artistic inspiration of Wotan’s (dying religious faith’s) heir, the music-dramatist Siegfried, by his muse, his unconscious mind, Brünnhilde.

(9) When Wotan tells Erda he no longer fears the twilight of the gods she foresaw but gladly embraces it because his heirs Siegfried and Brünnhilde will redeem the world from Alberich’s Ring Curse, this is Wagner’s metaphor for his notion that when religious faith (the gods) could no longer be sustained in the face of science’s advancement in knowledge (Erda’s knowledge), religious faith could live on, reborn as feeling, in secular art, particularly in the non-conceptual art of music.

(10) Siegfried’s betrayal of his lover, muse, and unconscious mind Brünnhilde, under Alberich’s son Hagen’s influence, by unwittingly and involuntarily giving her away to his blood-brother Gunther, is Wagner’s metaphor for the fact that in his Ring he’s betrayed the hitherto secret process underlying religious revelation and unconscious artistic inspiration to his audience, through his musical motifs, represented by the Woodbird’s songs Siegfried interprets for his audience.

(11) Wagner’s creative advance from author and composer of romantic operas (The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin), in which his music had what he described as only a mechanical relationship to the development of the plot, to the revolutionary music-dramas (the Ring, Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and Parsifal), in which Wagner’s music, and his musical motifs, develop in an organic association with the drama, is allegorically dramatized in a crucial distinction between the plot of Lohengrin, the last of his romantic operas, and the Ring, the first of his music-dramas. This distinction is the following: where Lohengrin refuses Elsa’s request that he share with her the secret of his true identity and origin, so she can help preserve his secret to protect him from the Noth (anguish) she supposes he would suffer if his secret was revealed, Wotan acquiesces to Brünnhilde’s plea that he confess to her what ails him, the unspoken secret of his divine Noth (Götternoth). Wotan’s confesses the truth he learned from Erda, that the gods (i.e., man’s religious beliefs) are predestined to destruction by man’s gradual accumulation of a hoard of objective knowledge. In the Ring, drama (Wotan’s confession of the unthinkable guilt in man’s history) and redemptive musical motifs of foreboding and reminiscence (Wagner’s artistic Wonder distilled from Wotan’s confession by Brünnhilde’s magic) attain complete organic union, redeeming man’s terrible history by transforming it into timeless myth.

(12) Wagner’s three canonical romantic operas and his four mature music-dramas can best be construed as a single work of art in continuous development, the Ring being the overall allegorical frame of reference for Wagner’s other canonical artworks, their master-myth.

A key purpose of The Wound That Will Never Heal is not merely to demonstrate the Ring can best be grasped as a unified whole if we approach it as an allegory along the lines of interpretation outlined in my list of pillars, but also to show how our new allegorical understanding will establish the Ring as the basic frame of reference within which we can understand all of Wagner’s other canonical romantic operas and music-dramas (which could be the subject of a second volume). For they’re each systematically linked conceptually with all or part of the Ring, which can be construed as their master myth or archetypal model. The Flying Dutchman, for instance, is a cryptic version of what would become the Ring. Tannhäuser is a seedbed for the plots of Siegfried, Twilight of the Gods, Tristan and Isolde, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, and Parsifal. Lohengrin isn’t only the seminal point of departure for the revolutionary music-dramas which followed, but is specifically the basis for two key plot elements of the Ring: (a) Wotan’s confession to Brünnhilde, and (b) Wotan’s punishment of Brünnhilde with banishment, loss of divine virginity, and deprivation of godhead in order that his heir Siegfried, the mortal, secular artist-hero, can win her and take aesthetic possession of the hoard of fearful knowledge Wotan imparted to her, thus redeeming him from Alberich’s Ring Curse. Please see my two studies of Lohengrin in the discussion forum archive at www.wagnerheim.com: My article How Elsa Showed Wagner the Way to Siegfried is in the archive on page 14, posted in three parts (corresponding with its three acts) on 10/2–3/2011. My elaboration of this paper, titled "Feuerbach’s Influence on Lohengrin," can be found in the archive on page 7 posted on four numbered parts on 6/16–17/2015. The plots of Tristan and Isolde and Twilight of the Gods are, as Wagner said himself, essentially identical. The Mastersingers of Nuremberg is a variation on the plots of The Valkyrie and Siegfried, while at the same time being the satyrplay to Tannhäuser, and the anti-thesis to Tristan and Isolde. And Parsifal, as has long been suspected, is virtually the fifth and final part of the four-part Ring, in which many of its unresolved issues are resolved, but it’s also the music-drama in which all of Wagner’s prior canonical artworks culminate, for all of their primary protagonists are, so to speak, reborn in those of Parsifal, their final incarnation. My study "Feuerbach’s Influence on Parsifal" can be found in the archive on page 7 posted in seven numbered parts on 6/17/2015.

Dozens of hitherto incomprehensible conundrums and seemingly irresolvable contradictions in Wagner’s drama, music, and their relationship, in the Ring and his other canonical artworks, can be construed with clarity or resolved thanks to this allegorical approach. Its success suggests that those exegetes who described the Ring as unsusceptible to dramatic or conceptual analysis within one frame of reference hadn’t asked the right questions, and/or hadn’t proposed a sufficiently all-embracing thread of narrative logic, to grasp the Ring’s allegorical grandeur and dramatic unity. This I believe explains why, during the early years in which I developed my unique reading of the Ring, when I read everything available on Wagner by other authors, I discovered, often to my surprise, that though a number of talented writers on Wagner’s artistic legacy had made discoveries of great explanatory value, which I was able to incorporate into my own work, many of these same authors often failed to follow up the implications which logically followed from their seminal insights. And in many instances the very insights that gave them an authentic purchase on Wagner’s creative work became a stumbling block to further exploration. A few examples will suffice.

Nietzsche, Wagner’s erstwhile champion and latter-day critic, had more access to Wagner and his works than anyone, and should have known, as no one else could, just how extraordinarily prescient the plot of Wagner’s Ring was—especially considering its colossal debt to Ludwig Feuerbach’s critique of religion—with respect to Nietzsche’s own mature philosophy. Yet, when one surveys the entire body of Nietzsche’s critique of Wagner, the Ring libretto is rarely discussed at all, and if so, generally only with biting condescension. In one notorious example, Nietzsche argued that the sole reason Wotan, in his role as the Wanderer, wakes Erda in Siegfried Act Three Scene One, is that we haven’t heard a soprano voice in a long while, so Wagner needed a pretext to produce one at this point. [The Case of Wagner, p. 175] Nietzsche’s critique is preposterous in view of the fact that this is one of the crucial moments in the Ring, when Wotan wills the end of the gods (religious faith), which Erda foretold, only because he’s persuaded that his ideals will live on in the love of his heirs (metaphor for secular art), the hero Siegfried and heroine Brünnhilde. S.3.1 is a dramatic turning point in the Ring, for Wotan passes the torch, the responsibility for preserving our human illusion of our transcendent value, from traditional religious belief to inspired secular art, by leaving his daughter Brünnhilde, who holds the key to the secret of the religious mysteries (Wotan’s confession), for the music-dramatist Siegfried to wake. Virtually every sentence in Wotan’s contentious dialogue with Erda is deeply meaningful (and steeped in Wagner’s musical motifs, which hugely amplify both the emotional and the conceptual resonance of the words they accompany), linking this passage musico-dramatically not only with the entirety of the Ring plot but also with Wagner’s other repertory operas and music-dramas.

George Bernard Shaw famously described the Ring as a thinking man’s allegory whose subject was the coming political and social revolution in Europe, a revolution incited by the evil effects of rampant capitalism and greed for money and power. Shaw’s reading is, of course, to some extent accurate, but he admitted it could only be applied to the first two thirds of the Ring. [Shaw, pp. 76–78] In truth, Shaw based most of his interpretation on a metaphorical reading of approximately one thirtieth of the Ring, Scene Three of The Rhinegold (in which Wotan and Loge visit Alberich and his fellow Nibelungs in Nibelheim), and general knowledge about Wagner’s revolutionary activities in 1849. That this reading has become a stumbling block to understanding was illustrated by one of the participants in a seminar on Wagner I attended in Chicago many years ago, who informed me after a provocative lecture that it was too bad Wagner couldn’t have engaged Shaw to write the Ring libretto for him, since in that case Shaw would have gotten it right and made the last third of the Ring consistent with the first two thirds. Consistent with Shaw, at least!

Shaw argued that Wagner’s alleged inconsistency was due to the fact that the libretto of Twilight of the Gods, the last part of the four-part Ring drama, was the first part of the Ring to be completed, and that it therefore still contained elements drawn from conventional romantic opera which Wagner finally emancipated himself from by the time he wrote the libretto of The Rhinegold, the last part of the four-part Ring libretto to be completed. This might seem convincing until we recall that Wagner acknowledged [See [811W-{12/71} ‘Epilogue to The Nibelung’s Ring,’ PW Vol. III, pp. 268–269] that the plot of Tristan and Isolde, a full-fledged revolutionary music-drama created after Wagner had completed the entire libretto of the Ring and two thirds of its music, is virtually identical to the plot of Twilight of the Gods. In both instances the hero, as if under a spell, gives his own true love away in marriage to another man, and thereby dooms himself. Though we can all agree that there are holdovers from his romantic opera days in Twilight of the Gods which Wagner would omit from his subsequent music-dramas, evidently this plot which the Ring and Tristan and Isolde share was central to Wagner’s concept of the revolutionary music-drama, something which distinguished it from romantic opera. In his too-strict adherence to a topical reading of the Ring as an allegory of 19th Century social, political, and economic revolution, Shaw blinded himself to this fundamental aspect of Wagner’s whole conception of music-drama. But Shaw’s virtue was that he understood the Ring is allegorical.

The Jungian Robert Donington had several signal insights into the Ring’s allegorical logic which will be detailed in the course of this study. The first of these will serve for illustration. Donington surmised that Alberich’s rejection by the Rhinedaughters, his renunciation of love, and forging of the Ring of power represents an important stage in the evolution of human consciousness. [Donington, p. 60] His insight led me to consider the possibility that Alberich’s Ring represents the human mind itself. Donington described Alberich’s Ring as Wagner’s metaphor for the Self in its Jungian sense, i.e. the entire human being, both good and bad, conscious and unconscious. [Donington, pp. 227–228] However, Donington failed to follow up this insight. The remainder of his book, after the first provocative chapter on The Rhinegold, and occasional world-class insights in subsequent chapters, becomes ever more arbitrary and divorced from the actual dynamics of the plot, as he tries to force Jungian categories on everything in the Ring, until by the end of his book this has reached the point of absurdity. Donington’s fatal mistake, it seems, was his failure to grasp that the Ring is an allegory of human history. He instead construed the Ring as an allegory of the maturation of the self from a psychological standpoint only. This gave him insight into some of the Ring’s secrets—such as the fact that Wotan, as a symbol for man per se, the self which is maturing in the course of the drama [Donington, p. 67], subsumes all the other protagonists of the Ring—but blinded him to many others.

However, since Donington provided the initial spark of inspiration for my lifetime of labor to grasp Wagner’s Ring and his other artworks, I must pay him due credit. First, he gave me the idea for the title of my book, The Wound That Will Never Heal. Donington’s seminal idea, that so influenced my own work, was that the Nibelung dwarf Alberich must become creative to compensate himself for his inherent incapacity to find normal contentment, what Donington calls the wound in the psyche, the price man pays for his acquisition of the gift of consciousness (Alberich’s forging of his Ring). [Donington, p. 82] This was the seed which gave birth to my central idea, that Alberich’s Ring Curse represents the price we humans pay for our gift of reflective consciousness, that we’re inherently incapable of accepting the world as it is, which inspires us to compensate ourselves for its deficiencies psychologically through religious faith, morality, and art, and practically through science, technology, and politics. An obvious source for this concept are the un-healing wounds from which Tristan and Amfortas suffer. It’s worth adding that another influence on my title of equal importance was the un-healing wound that Prometheus, exposed (like Brünnhilde) to the elements on a mountaintop, suffers as the god Zeus’s punishment for having (like Brünnhilde) aided mortal man against Zeus’s will by granting man god’s divine gifts (not only fire, but specifically the gift of foresight, for Prometheus in Greek means foresight). This comes to the same thing as Donington’s wound in the psyche, for foresight is a key property of man’s uniquely reflective consciousness, one which though it grants us the greatest power of all animal species, also exacts the greatest price, man’s foresight of inevitable death.

A brief reckoning of some of Donington’s other contributions will illustrate my debt to him. I’ve mentioned Donington’s crucial insight that Wotan, a symbol for humanity, subsumes all the other characters in the Ring. This led Donington to suggest that Brünnhilde represents specifically Wotan’s unconscious desire [Donington, p. 164], that Mime represents Siegfried’s fear [Donington, pp. 176–177], that Wotan’s contest of knowledge with Mime can only be understood if we recognize them as the same character [Donington, p. 180], and that Dark-Alberich is Wotan’s (Light-Alberich’s) Jungian shadow [Donington, p. 63]. Each of these enlightening ideas have been my springboards to further discoveries. Especially helpful with respect to my endeavor to grasp Wotan’s character and fate was Donington’s remark that our fate is actually one with our true character, [Donington, p. 235] an idea I subsequently discovered was expressed by Wagner’s mentor Ludwig Feuerbach.

On the subject of religion and art as an evasion of truth, Donington provided four insights which have been very helpful to me in my quest to plumb the Ring’s depths. He noted, for instance, that a great artist half reveals and half conceals the truth, concealing it because the full light of the truth would be insupportable. [Donington, p. 15] Yet he went on to say that if illusion is the disease, the truth, no matter how bitter, heals. [Donington, p. 262] These insights were immensely helpful to me in my effort to understand Wotan, though Donington didn’t specifically apply them to Wotan. Equally helpful were his observations that both religion and art reflect human infantilism, our longing to return to the womb, and that art allows us to play with reality and enjoy its benefits symbolically without suffering the consequences which would follow if we engaged in actual life [Donington, p. 247]. These astute observations were helpful when I began to see Siegfried as an artist-hero in whom Wotan (man’s religious impulse) sought redemption from truth, though Donington never construed Wotan or the gods specifically as a symbol for man’s religious impulse, nor did he ever describe Siegfried as Wagner’s metaphor for an artist.

However, in spite of the fact that my engagement with the Ring as an allegory began with a close reading of Donington’s Jungian study, which gave me many fruitful ideas for further development, my book isn’t a Jungian interpretation. Rather, I’ve drawn insight from Donington’s Jungian interpretation, among many other sources equally important, such as the work of the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and others too numerous to name.

My debt to Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose writings I studied as an undergraduate and graduate student in anthropology, is also considerable. His books introduced me to several key concepts which have greatly influenced my understanding of Wagner. One of the most beneficial was his constant emphasis on the foundational trauma represented by man’s evolutionary transition from the state of Nature (preconscious animal instinct) to Culture (communication through symbols, language), which produced a series of perhaps irresolvable contradictions. It’s the underlying purpose of myth to resolve these. Another seminal Lévi-Straussian observation was that Wagner was the founder of Lévi-Strauss’s enterprise, the structural analysis of myths, and that the conceptual structures of myths are reproduced in music. [Lévi-Strauss—The Raw and the Cooked, p. 15] A close reading of my book will leave you in no doubt how deeply Lévi-Strauss’s following tribute to Wagner has influenced my own outlook: Before taking the place of religion, the fine arts were in religion, as the forms of contemporary music were already in the myths before contemporary music came into being. It was doubtless with Wagner that music first became conscious of the evolutionary process causing it to take over the structures of myth … . [Lévi-Strauss—The Naked Man, pp. 653–654] Finally, Lévi-Strauss’s elaboration of Vladimir Propp’s idea that there’s a sort of archetypal folktale (or myth) which lies behind the actual folktales (or myths) recorded in the field, in reference to which one can grasp details in specific folktales (or myths) which otherwise would be incomprehensible, was partly what prompted my decision to treat Wagner’s four mature music-dramas as if they’re one, single, unified work of art.

The musicologist Deryck Cooke made the most ambitious effort yet to comprehend the entire Ring, libretto and music, within one interpretation. He passed away prematurely while still completing the second of four projected parts, on The Valkyrie. One of his greatest contributions to Wagner scholarship is his unprecedented analysis of the evolution of, and family relationships among, the Ring’s musical motifs, in An Introduction to Der Ring Des Nibelungen, surely the greatest lecture on the Ring’s musical motifs ever recorded. Cooke demonstrated that Wagner’s Ring has a musical/motival coherence on a mass scale which is unique in the history of Western music (and of course entirely unique in drama, since Wagner was the only great dramatist who was also a great composer). Dr. Allen Dunning’s list of 177 of the Ring’s musical motifs was based on Cooke’s lecture, though Dr. Dunning corrected some of Cooke’s errors and added his own discoveries. My new list of 193–194 motifs incorporates most of Dr. Dunning’s list (minus a few I’ve eliminated), and includes his musical notation for motifs not included in his numbered list which I’ve added.

Cooke began well but was unable to follow up many of his fine insights into the genealogical relationships among the motifs, when in his I Saw the World End (1976) he attempted to describe their dramatic significance, because the frame of reference within which he tried to describe the Ring libretto and tease out its allegorical elements was too narrow and inflexible. Aside from a few helpful observations, he simply could not discern and describe the more far-reaching allegorical significance of his great insights into the evolution of, and mutual relations among, the musical motifs, and thus he missed dozens of clues to Wagner’s allegorical logic in the libretto.

He made one fundamental error in interpretation which was bound to have a dire effect on his entire enterprise. He stated categorically that in the Ring meaning lies ultimately in the music, not the dramatic text or action: All that really matters is that the ultimate meaning of a Wagner ‘drama’ is achieved through the music, as Wagner himself was perfectly well aware. [Cooke, p. 65] The example he chose to illustrate this illustrates just the opposite. In The Valkyrie Act Two, Scene Two, Wotan has just been convinced, against his will, that he must follow his wife Fricka’s advice that he support her protege Hunding’s intent to kill Wotan’s beloved son Siegmund for breaking the divine prohibition of adultery and incest, to ensure that the gods’ rule will be respected. When his daughter Brünnhilde asks him what ails him, he explodes in a semi-coherent tirade (which I reproduce here in Cooke’s version, plus musical motifs numbered according to my newly revised version of Allen Dunning’s original list, which he based on Cooke’s list):

"(H81; H50) Oh divinity’s disgrace!

(H81; H50) Oh shameful wrong!

(H78) God’s distress [Götternoth]!

(H78) God’s distress!

(H39) Unending wrath! (H39) Eternal grief!

(H35) I am the unhappiest of all beings!"

Cooke notes Wotan’s verbiage is purely emotional and expresses no concepts:

… even Wagner’s original [German text] is no more than a generalized indication of thought and feeling, conveying nothing in itself as to the essential nature of Wotan’s self-disgust, rage, and despair, or the wider implications of them. If this passage of the text were offered at such a crucial moment in a poetic drama, we should rightly regard it as so much empty mouthing; we should expect a more masterly use of language, peculiar to the character concerned, expressing his state of mind and feeling in a much more complex way, and setting up all kinds of resonances backwards and forwards throughout the drama. / In fact, we are offered just such an experience by this brief passage, which is one of the most supreme moments in The Valkyrie, but the language used to provide it is the language of music. … the resonances backwards and forwards are set up by the development and transformation of previous musical ideas, in the orchestra and in the voice. [Cooke, pp. 66–67]

Cooke then describes the origins and dramatic associations, within the context of the Ring drama, of the five motifs in play during Wotan’s explosion of despair. But he’s gotten this entirely wrong. The reason these five motifs have so much dramatic resonance, aside from their purely musical expressive power, is their former association with passages of libretto text and dramatic incidents, which demonstrates that poetic drama is clearly the source of the motifs’ accumulated resonances. Wagner’s motifs are messengers of Wagner’s thoughts as expressed by his characters and their dramatic situations. The ultimate source of meaning remains the poetic text of the drama, even when that meaning is carried by identifiable musical motifs with which it’s been associated in the course of the drama.

Another example of an opportunity Cooke missed will illustrate how I’ve been able to employ partial insights from prior pioneers in Wagner studies while leaving the burden of their interpretation behind as unusable. In a chapter covering the various allegorical subjects embraced by Wagner in his Ring, Cooke quotes Wagner [Cooke, pp. 250–254] on the subject of the evolution of human consciousness, and the development of religio-artistic thought, and scientific thought, which is where my interpretation begins and ends. Cooke has within his grasp in these few passages, and in his astute commentary on them, the means to construe the entire Ring allegory, but misses the opportunity completely. A brief extract from his book will suffice to illustrate:

At first [.e., after natural evolution had produced the human species], humanity followed its natural instincts, which were as follows: (a) a need to wrest from nature the means of existence; (b) a need for communication, which led to the evolution of language; (c) a need for mutual love and fellowship, which led to the establishing of the family and eventually, of society; and (d) a need to explain to itself its relationship to nature, which led to the creation of myths, and thus to religion and art. / It is the third of these four instincts which mainly concerns us here—the Need for mutual love and fellowship that led to the establishment of society. [Cooke, p. 253]

By skipping over instinct (a), the acquisition of knowledge which leads to science and technology, and instinct (d), the creation of myths, of religion and art, and never invoking these again for the remainder of his study, Cooke misses two of the main allegorical strands of meaning in the Ring. He then discusses the influence of the atheist philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach on Wagner, whose critique of religion and celebration of science and secular art is an influence which I find throughout the Ring, but which Cooke quickly passes over without bringing it up again. An equally fateful omission occurs two pages later, in which he discusses an extract in which Wagner paraphrases Feuerbach’s critique of religion:

This ‘error’ on the part of primitive peoples—the creation of gods and of religion was, Wagner maintained, a magnificent one, since it arose from that natural instinctive need of humanity to explain to itself its relationship to nature, and it led to the creation of the great myths, which were marvelous projections of humanity’s own highest ideals and aspirations. And the factual error itself was eventually corrected by science, which discovered the causes of nature’s effects inside nature. [Cooke, p. 254]

After a few pages Cooke leaves this profound subject behind, never to bring it up again for the remainder of his study. But it’s the whole affair! The entire Ring plot is contained in brief in these few remarks. Nonetheless, Cooke was the first to draw attention to this subject, and ultimately inspired me to undertake a comprehensive survey of the entire body of Wagner’s writings and recorded remarks, and compare them with the libretto texts of his operas and music-dramas (and their music). Had he lived to complete his study of the Ring, would Cooke eventually have incorporated these insights? Perhaps. But if one peruses the final chapters he completed in his study of The Valkyrie one finds increasingly strained efforts to construe the complexities of the plot according to his assumptions.

The last author I’ll consider in detail is Jean-Jacques Nattiez, whose Wagner Androgyne (1990) is one of the most insightful studies of the Ring in the literature, but which only influenced my own interpretation after-the-fact, since I’d already developed its essentials (such as my twelve pillars), and particularly those insights in which our work overlaps, before I first became familiar with Nattiez’s work in 1983. One of Nattiez’s primary insights (which we have in common) is that in Wagner’s mature music-dramas, the hero and heroine, particularly Siegfried and Brünnhilde, are metaphors for the poet-dramatist, and music, respectively. Therefore, their loving union is Wagner’s metaphor for his revolutionary music-drama, in which the poetic drama and music serve each other in an organic (i.e., loving) way unknown, according to Wagner, to traditional opera, in which vocal music is usually the main affair and the staged drama and libretto merely provide a pretext for beautiful song. In my original and independently developed take on this reading, I concurred with Nattiez in construing Siegfried as a metaphor for the music-dramatist, but I differed from him in seeing Brünnhilde as Siegfried’s unconscious mind, and therefore as his muse of unconscious artistic inspiration. Nattiez noticed that this metaphor—the loving union of hero and heroine as Wagner’s image of the relationship of drama to music—was explicit in