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 .