"In which film was Wagner's ""Ride of the Valkyries"" used to underscore a helicopter attack?"
Ride of the Valkyries Doc?" (1957). The "Ride" features in "Apocalypse Now" (1979), where the 1/9 Air Cavalry squadron plays it on helicopter-mounted loudspeakers during their assault on a North Vietnamese-controlled village as psychological warfare and to motivate their own troops. Notes Sources Ride of the Valkyries The "Ride of the Valkyries" () refers to the beginning of act 3 of "Die Walküre", the second of the four operas constituting Richard Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen". As a separate piece, the "Ride" is often heard in a purely instrumental version, which may be as short as three minutes. Together with the "Bridal Chorus" from
Ride of the Valkyries Wagner subsequently wrote a complaint to the publisher Schott. In the period up to the first performance of the complete "Ring" cycle, Wagner continued to receive requests for separate performances, his second wife Cosima noting "Unsavoury letters arrive for R. – requests for the Ride of the Valkyries and I don't know what else." Once the "Ring" had been given in Bayreuth in 1876, Wagner lifted the embargo. He himself conducted it in London on 12 May 1877, repeating it as an encore. Uses in film include the original score for "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), and "What's Opera,