Paul 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.
The product of 50 years of scholarship, Heise challenges the standard
view that Wagner merely dramatized the conflict between love and power
and demonstrates instead that the composer's 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.