The project of The Ring is to show in poetic form that man creates gods out of his own need, but in the end must live without them, with bleak consequences. The cycle presents a crepuscular hunter-gatherer world on the edge of a more organised society, in which the exercise of power, even where well-intentioned, rests on an illegitimate arrogation. Love and sacrifice emerge as the only means of opposing this power and as the sole path to redemption, so that the only valid response to the original sin of existence is renunciation. Meanwhile, the gods’ departure carries with it the loss of the framework of bargains which they have imposed: Siegfried’s betrayal of Brünnhilde is a consequence of the breaking of Wotan’s spear.

As Scruton writes of the celebrated Funeral March: “freedom, individuality, ambition and law must run their course and nothing will sound of thereafter save the distant lullaby of nature.” Love, in its most noble and sacrificial form, may transfigure us along the way, but cannot in the end rescue us from a godless and purely tragic condition, which we can only meet by willed self-abnegation. Thus the enthusiastic discipleship of Feuerbach gives way to the orientalist pessimism of Schopenhauer.

There is a poet inside Scruton, and some of his writing contains a lambent quality which casts familiar moments in a new light. He is surely right to focus especial attention on the two most sacred episodes in the cycle. First, in Act Three of Die Walküre, Wotan consigns to sleep and kisses away the godhead of his daughter Brünnhilde, who has followed the way of love forbidden to the immortals, and to their president in particular, with “the good-night kiss in which a parent feels with a melting tenderness the absolute value of the mortal being who is escaping into sleep and who will one day escape into nothingness”. This is a moment of incarnation, in which a god chooses humanity with the intention of saving it, but the outcome of this sacrificial act is to render the immortals redundant by granting them the experience of love. For the love and grief in which Wotan punishes his daughter mean that his godhead, in Scruton’s apt citation from Shakespeare, is “subdued to what it works in, like the dyer’s hand”, and Wotan himself is reduced by Brünnhilde’s purity to a subject in his own sovereign space. No one before Scruton has shown just how and in what detail this is reflected in the music. The ultimate consequence of the renunciation which ensues is the second moment of supreme transcendence in The Ring, and it is a reflection of the first. At the close of the cycle, in Act Three of Götterdämmerung, Brünnhilde releases her father from the existential anxiety that has haunted his noble spirit, and puts him finally and definitively to rest. Scruton’s analysis of the musical motives and allusions against the background of which this occurs rises to the unspeakable poignancy of what is shown us: this is (among many other things) nothing less than the end of religion. “Never has something so mighty been laid so gently to rest.”

The chapter on how the music works deserves particular praise. Scruton exposes how Wagner uses the basic structures of music — in particular the diatonic, pentatonic scales and the chromatic melodies that occupy the gaps in between these scales — to make important dramatic and philosophical assertions about (for example) the emergence of consciousness from the natural state, and the price that must be paid in suffering — by men and ultimately by gods — for love. The discussion of the leitmotiv, a topic of much superficial or misguided comment in the literature, rightly takes Deryck Cooke’s work as its point of departure but achieves a depth of insight that alone makes this book required reading for anyone who wants to understand the interrelationship between music and drama in The Ring.