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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring by George Bernard Shaw: emphatically, Wagner chose, for convenience' sake, to work up
this final scene with it rather than with the more distinguished,
elaborate and beautiful themes connected with the love of
Brynhild and Siegfried.
He would certainly not have thought this a matter of no
consequence had he finished the whole work ten years earlier. It
must always be borne in mind that the poem of The Ring was
complete and printed in 1853, and represents the sociological
ideas which, after germinating in the European atmosphere for
many years, had been brought home to Wagner, who was intensely
susceptible to such ideas, by the crash of 1849 at Dresden. Now
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