You know this one before it gets going. The horns start climbing, the strings break into a gallop, and the whole thing surges forward like something enormous is cresting a hill and coming straight for you. It is the sound of overwhelming force arriving, and screen composers reach for it whenever they need you to brace. A modern audience has heard it most recently coming out of a god of mischief.
In the fifth episode of "Loki," in 2021, the show's oldest, most worn-out version of the character, Classic Loki, makes his last stand. He throws up a giant illusion to buy his friends time against the cloud-monster Alioth, and as he does, the score reaches for the most famous "here comes the cavalry" cue in music. Composer Natalie Holt threads an arrangement of the "Ride of the Valkyries" through Loki's own theme as he goes down fighting. It is not a needle-drop of an old Wagner record. Holt wrote it into the Loki theme, on purpose, and the purpose is the whole joke: the Valkyries are the warrior-goddesses who carry dead heroes off to the afterlife, and that is exactly what is happening on screen.
Goddesses on horseback, gathering the dead
Strip away the helicopters and the Marvel finale and the "Ride of the Valkyries" is an entrance cue for an opera.
It opens the third act of Richard Wagner's "Die Walküre," which translates as "The Valkyrie," one of the four operas in his giant Ring cycle. The Valkyries are warrior-maidens who ride out over the battlefield, collect the heroes who have fallen, and carry them off to Valhalla, the hall of the slain. The music is their ride. That galloping, climbing surge you brace for is the sound of armored goddesses crossing the sky on horseback with dead soldiers slung behind them.
So it was never triumphant battle music, whatever the cartoons did to it later.
Wagner wrote it for figures who collect corpses.
The grandeur and the death are welded together from the first bar, which is precisely why it keeps working on screen. A composer who needs "something powerful is about to descend, and it is bad news" already has the perfect cue sitting in a 19th-century opera, pre-loaded with exactly that meaning.
The colonel who armed his helicopters with a stereo
The reason any of this lives in the modern ear at all traces back to one scene.
In Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," from 1979, Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore, played by Robert Duvall, leads a helicopter assault on a coastal village. Before they go in, he has the "Ride of the Valkyries" piped through loudspeakers bolted to the aircraft, blasting it across the water as the gunships sweep toward the shore. It does two jobs at once: psychological warfare aimed down at the village, and a jolt of nerve aimed at his own men, winding them up for what they are about to do.
That scene is one of the most quoted things ever put on film. Wagner and helicopters fused into a single shorthand, a unit of cinema language, and plenty of people who can hum the tune have no idea it ever set foot in an opera house. Once Coppola welded the Ride to "overwhelming force descending from the sky," every later use, the Loki finale included, is borrowing from that weld. The cue means what it means now partly because a fictional colonel weaponized a stereo.
And the colonel's stereo came from life. The screenwriter who put the scene on the page, John Milius, built it on real reports of US forces broadcasting music from loudspeakers during the Vietnam War. The loudspeaker, the open air, the sound used as a weapon and a wind-up, that part was drawn from the record. What Milius added was the one piece in the whole repertoire that had been about sky-borne killers since the opera first reached the stage. He did not bend the music to fit the scene. It fit cold.
Go hear the part everyone only knows in bursts
If the "Ride of the Valkyries" has only ever reached you in two-minute bursts, under rotor blades or behind a Marvel last stand, you have been hearing a sound effect rather than the music. It belongs to one of the most ambitious works ever staged, and it lands differently when you let it run the way Wagner wrote it, with the whole orchestra behind it and nowhere to fade out to.
The Essential Classics Wagner collection below opens cold on the part you know, the Ride itself, before moving through the overtures and preludes that built his reputation. Press play, let the horns climb, and for once follow the cavalry all the way in.
The next time something terrible and enormous comes over the horizon on a screen, a helicopter line, a god's last stand, whatever they reach for next, you will know what is really flying overhead. It was gathering the dead long before it ever carried a soldier.
