Intermedial and Multimodal Approaches to Wagner´s 'Ride of the Valkyries'

On the 25 August 2018, environmental activists in the North German Hambach Forest woke up to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” blasting from police loudspeakers. Since 2012, the occupants had lived there in tree houses to prevent the forest from giving way to a surface coal mine. The forest evacuation has gotten huge media attention, with some journalists comparing the occupants to the inhabitants the Gallic village of Asterix or to the Vietcong.

 

“The Ride of the Valkyries” as a soundtrack to conflict has its predecessors as well – it supports the ride of the KuKluxKlan and their attack on black soldiers in "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), it features in Nazi newsreels, and in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) –all troublesome role models for a police operation. What, then, do conflict parties want to communicate with this piece of music? As “The Ride of the Valkyries” appears to go along with attempts to impose a certain social order, are we thus to understand this musical usage as a form of propaganda? And how does this work, when music tends to defy definite meanings?

 

We discuss these questions of musical propaganda and transmediation by exploring “The Ride of the Valkyries” in the social and multimodal contexts of three different uses of the music: in Wagner’s opera, in a Nazi newsreel, in Apocalypse Now, and finally in the Hambach forest evacuation.