Overview

• The Richard Wagner Festival in Bayreuth has wrapped for 2025, with its 150th anniversary slated for next year.
• Hundreds of film scores borrow Wagner for sweeping emotion, dramatic impact and memorable leitmotifs.
• Recent and classic touchpoints cited include Promising Young Woman, Melancholia, Romeo + Juliet, Apocalypse Now and The Blues Brothers.
• Frequently used cues include Tristan und Isolde’s prelude and Liebestod, Die Walküre’s Ride of the Valkyries and Götterdämmerung’s funeral march, heard even in Captain America: The First Avenger.
• The coverage underlines a layered legacy that spans parody and propaganda, from Chaplin’s The Great Dictator to Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, which continues to inform today’s sensitivities.