Ride of the Valkyries (Die Walküre, Act III)

Richard Wagner was, by nearly universal agreement, one of the worst human beings to ever write transcendent music. Anti-Semitic, megalomaniacal, financially predatory, serially unfaithful, and possessed of an ego so vast it required its own opera house — which he actually built, in Bayreuth, designed specifically to perform his works and no one else's. He seduced his best friend's wife, Cosima von Bülow, daughter of Franz Liszt, while said friend was actively conducting Wagner's operas. The man had no shame, infinite talent, and the interpersonal ethics of a tapeworm.

Ride of the Valkyries opens Act III of Die Walküre, the second opera in Wagner's Ring Cycle — a four-opera, sixteen-hour saga based on Norse mythology that took him twenty-six years to complete. The scene depicts warrior maidens on flying horses, carrying fallen heroes to Valhalla. It is eight minutes of escalating orchestral mayhem that sounds exactly like an army of immortal women on flying horses would sound, which is to say: magnificent, terrifying, and completely over the top.

Francis Ford Coppola cemented the piece in popular culture when he used it in the helicopter attack scene in Apocalypse Now, which is arguably the single most effective use of classical music in cinema history. The juxtaposition of Wagner's triumphant bombast with the horror of napalm created something that transcends both the music and the film. Wagner would have loved it. He believed art should be a total sensory assault, and a helicopter gunship firing rockets while his music blasts from loudspeakers fits that philosophy better than anything he could have staged in Bayreuth.

The uncomfortable truth about Wagner is that his music is genuinely revolutionary. He invented the leitmotif system, expanded the orchestra to unprecedented size, dissolved the boundaries between aria and recitative, and essentially created the template for modern film scoring. Every John Williams soundtrack owes a debt to Wagner. Every Hans Zimmer crescendo traces back to Bayreuth. The worst person in the room also happened to be the most influential composer of the nineteenth century, and history hasn't figured out what to do with that yet.