Siegfried is the least-performed of the four parts of the Ring and some people who admire Wagner's music dramas are bored by this one. But I find it the most fun, and so does my wife. She loves its action scenes and its descriptive orchestral passages while I like its jubilant music about the outdoor life.

No doubt this focus on fun will offended some Ring devotees who insist that Siegfried isn't supposed to be fun. This is serious drama, no question about it. But Wagner, like Shakespeare, knew how to use humor for contrast. Wagner even utilized the show-business trick of putting animals on stage to enliven things, and in this opera we see a bear, a dragon and - figuratively - a bird.

The music, too, abounds in contrast. The prelude is dark and brooding, then the first scene comes skipping along with rhythmic insistence. The scheming Mime, brother of Alberich who stole the gold from the Rhine Maidens, belittles and scolds the youngster whom he has raised, Siegfried. In response, the handsome hero insults the ugly dwarf. If you wonder how their reciprocal insults can be humorous, think of Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows as Ralph Kramden and his wife on TV's "The Honeymooners."

The middle scene of the first act is a tense confrontation between Mime and a mysterious Wanderer who, obviously to everyone in the audience, is Wotan. They challenge each other with three riddles apiece. Puccini used this dramatic form in Turandot half a century later but Wagner's music is much darker. Their face-off supplies narrative: Wotan lets Mime know that he will not succeed in his plan to use Siegfried to kill Fafner the dragon and steal the gold.

The well-balanced arc of the first act ends with Mime and Siegfried alone again in a cave where the boy repairs his father's sword and demonstrates its power by splitting the anvil as the curtain falls.

The title character is hard to like. Some viewers find him to be just a dumb muscular hunk. (His parents were brother and sister, so how bright can we expect him to be?) Siegfried is not a humble, aw-shucks naif like the movies' Van Johnson. He bullies his caregiver and at one point grabs Mime's throat. He is insolent to an elderly stranger. Yet the music drama - indeed, the entire Ring - suffers if we cannot find endearing qualities in this guy.

From the time of the Ring's premiere until World War I, Americans saw characteristics in Siegfried with which they identified. He was a pioneer roaming the woods. An adventurer, innocent of the intrigues of civilized Europeans, he was unspoiled and unbound. Siegfried was the "All-American Boy," like Jack Armstrong, the radio hero who was sponsored by Wheaties, "the breakfast of champions." This is what the drama needs.

America when the opera premiered in 1876 was celebrating its centennial. The telephone was invented that year. The first transcontinental railroad was recently completed. Oklahoma was about to be opened to settlers. American Indians were being displaced. Europeans, including Wagner, were aware of the lure of American optimism and expansionism.

Wagner responded by writing the part of an aggressive modern man who defies all the rules of the past. He roams the wilderness, slays a dragon, discovers treasure, bonds with the birds of the forest and explores his country. Then he climbs to the top of a rocky mountain, walks through fire and awakens the ideal woman. Once again we can delight in Wagner's delicious alliteration as Siegfried sings: "Die Brünste brennen, zu Brünnhilde muss ich dahin." (The blaze is burning, to Brünnhilde I must go.")

Critic Henry Krehbiel (1854-1923) wrote of Siegfried: "In rude forcefulness and freedom from restrictive conventions [he was] representative of the American people...so full of that vital energy that made us a nation." If we see him with this sympathetic aura we will feel real tragedy when he is murdered in Götterdämmerung.

Just as I completed this article I heard about a new book by American historian Jackson Lears, who reexamines a period commonly considered to be a "progressive" era. In Rebirth of a Nation Lears argues that, beginning in the 1870s, the United States expanded around a "militarist fantasy" of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Rather than a country gloriously reaching maturity (like the young Siegfried), Lear writes that those efforts produced the conquest of American Indians, lynching of Negroes, war in Cuba and the Philippines. He writes that militarism and racism, commonly attributed to Germany from Wagner's time to Hitler's, also became a part of America's destiny.

The allusions to Siegfried are mine, not Lears's, but he writes that America's struggles for conquest were animated by "longings for release from bourgeois normality into a realm of heroic struggle." This sounds a lot like what I've been writing about Wagner.

I find it fascinating that, in an opera about overthrowing the old order, Wagner used a very orderly form. Each act of Siegfried consists of three scenes and almost all of them are played "in two," as theatre-folks say, with just two characters addressing each other. In Act 2 the young man kills the dragon, takes the golden ring, tastes blood and gains the power of understanding nature. Specifically, he is able to understand the words sung by a forest bird who tells him where to find the gold treasure and where to find Brünnhilde.

Act 3 also is divided into three scenes. The Wanderer summons his one-time lover, Erda, who gave birth to his nine Valkyrie daughters, to ask what the future holds. Wotan was attracted to the Earth-goddess because she was all-wise. Now her vision is cloudy. She tells Wotan to get information, instead, from her three Norn daughters. "My wisdom once had a conqueror's force; now I want to go back to sleep," she says. This dimming of Erda's mental acuity brings tears to the eyes of anyone who lost, or is in the process of losing a loved one to Alzheimers. It is hardest to bear when the person once was highly intelligent.

Then the adolescent Siegfried meets his grandfather, Wotan. Wagner wrote that "Siegfried is the man of the future whom we long for but cannot ourselves bring into being, who must create himself by our destruction." So the kid shatters Wotan's spear which contains the laws of the gods. It's as if an incoming American president would tear up the United States Constitution, or a new British ruler would destroy the Magna Carta.

When James Morris sang Wotan the Wanderer in the old Met production, he smiled as he walked off the stage for his character's last time. Although Wotan has been humiliated, he is pleased that his offspring is going to rule the world and inaugurate a new type of civilization. So he thinks.

This smile is an instance where director or actor adds an interpretative detail that is not specified in Wagner's text - but neither does it violate an instruction by the composer. Some say no one should tamper with the original, but stage directors aver that interpretive gestures and movements are a natural part of theater, and I agree.

The meeting between Siegfried and Brünnhilde, is touching and human. This is the first time they've met but she knows full well that he is the child of Sieglinde that she swore to protect. Brünnhilde has mixed feelings. She is happy to have Siegfried as a lover but regrets the loss of her godly powers, which Wotan stripped from her because she disobeyed him, and she is upset not only about that loss but also about the end of freedom and independence that occurs when we immerse ourselves in a new relationship.

The other three operas in the Ring end with gorgeous melody: magisterial in Rheingold, elegiac in Walküre, and overwhelming in Götterdämmerung. Compared to that, the ending of Siegfried is a disappointment, although it is expressed with intricately-developed harmonies. Wagner wrote a beautiful orchestral ascending scale with divided high strings for the moment when Siegfried awakens Brünnhilde. But then he stretched out their love music excessively and added a peroration of upwardly-leaping bombast.

Have you ever contemplated how much age difference exists between Brünnhilde and Siegfried? He is in his teens and she must have been older than that before Siegfried was born, when she was the chief Valkyrie. So she now is in her forties. A man sitting behind us at a recent performance said to his companion that Brünnhilde probably did not age during her years of slumber. But he was wrong. Wotan took immortality away from Brünnhilde, so she would age just like a human being. This romance between an older woman and a younger man is Wagner striking another blow at 19th-century social conventions.

Such supposition is a harmless diversion - one of many ways that we Ring enthusiasts amuse ourselves during the 15 hours and the six intermissions of the Ring. The feeling at the end of Siegfried is happiness and hope for the future.

Soon everything is going to go wrong.