The fact is that in order to write compellingly on The Ring, a blend of two skills is required, and Scruton amply possesses both. For The Ring, to put it so concisely as inevitably to distort, is a work of philosophy in which the discourse is conducted primarily in music. It has this in common with Tristan and Isolde, though both the philosophical concerns and the musical materials are far broader in scope. Who better than a writer who is both a philosopher and a composer to take on the tasks (which Scruton separates) of what meaning inheres in the drama and what meaning we should ascribe to it? Indeed Scruton is one of the finest philosopher-musicians since Schopenhauer, whose name naturally crops up in these pages as the thinker who, after Feuerbach, most influenced Wagner and at least the later stages of the composition of the music of The Ring. 

Wagner’s music dramas were concerned with mythic truth, and the myths — rediscovered by Jakob Grimm and others — are those which expressed the deep identity of the German peoples at its deepest level. Wagner elaborated these myths for his own purposes. As Scruton shows: “Wagner’s works are . . . more than mere dramas: they are revelations, attempts to penetrate to the mysterious core of human existence. They are not unique in this: Aeschylus and Shakespeare (to both of whom Wagner was greatly indebted) also present dramas that are shaped as religious epiphanies. But Wagner worked in another medium, which enabled him to present the conscious and individual passions of his characters simultaneously with their universal and unconscious archetypes. The orchestra does not merely accompany Wagner’s singers, nor are they merely singers. The orchestra does not merely accompany Wagner’s singers, nor are the singers merely singers. The orchestra fills in the space beneath the revealed emotions with all the ancestral longings of our species, irresistibly transforming these individual passions into symbols of a common destiny that can be sensed but not told. Wagner acquaints us with our lot, and makes available to an age without religious belief the core religious experience.”

The Ring explores deep general preoccupations of Scruton’s, which have been thought through with lucidity in his earlier writings. The roles of the sacred, the sacramental and the sacrifice, especially self-sacrifice — as ways of gathering meaning from and ascribing meaning to life — feature for example in his superlative book on Tristan and Isolde, Death-Devoted Heart. What he has to tell us therefore emerges naturally from the works, rather than being imposed on them, because he shares or is willing to assume the truth of Wagner’s belief that the core religious phenomenon is not the idea of God, but the sense of the sacred. 

Scruton explains Wagner’s recognition that the need for religion in man was inherent, but had outlived any possible belief in God. Art was thus to be the medium whereby the authentic religious urges of man were to find expression. As Wagner famously wrote: “It is reserved to art to salvage the kernel of religion, inasmuch as the mythical images which religion would wish to be believed as true are apprehended in art for their symbolic value, and through ideal representation of those symbols art reveals the concealed deep truth within them.” Wagner presents the sacred as a purely human phenomenon, one that might be looked upon by a god with envy and awe, as in The Ring, but which needs no god to complete it. Art expresses and completes our religious emotions or, as Scruton puts it with a characteristic aphorism, art shows the believable moral realities behind the unbelievable metaphysics.