The Ring of Truth: the wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung
Roger Scruton

Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung is an extraordinary work of art. It is also extraordinarily demanding. Four evenings in the opera house are occupied with an introductory piece in a long single act, Das Rheingold, and then three huge music dramas of three acts each: Die Walküre, Siegfried and finally Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods).

Hours of concentration are required from the audience, and some preparatory work is almost essential if the story, the characters, and above all the music through which the audience learns to understand them, are to make any sense.

Since the whole tetralogy was first performed in Bayreuth in 1876, a plethora of books and essays on The Ring has appeared. Roger Scruton, a philosopher (like Bryan Magee and Michael Tanner, who have also written brilliantly on Wagner), has now made his own major contribution to the subject, dealing on the way with the partial and therefore misleading interpretations of Marxists, Nietzscheans, Jungians, Adorno theorists and more.

One powerful motive for Scruton’s undertaking is the near impossibility, now, of finding a production that is faithful to the wholeness of Wagner’s creation, since neuralgia about Wagner’s anti-Semitism and Hitler’s ­admiration for his work has driven productions “to satirise or deny” the work’s real meaning. Without reference to the natural world, what becomes of the framing story of peaceful nature polluted by human resentment and lust for power?