ABSTRACT
Legendary sound editor Walter Murch once recounted how he had tested nineteen recordings of Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” to find the perfect match for the iconic scene in Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola, 1979) in which the military helicopters swarm over the water in preparation for an attack. Narrowing down to the final two, he compared Erich Leinsdorf’s recording with Georg Solti’s version (which was eventually used in the film). As Murch describes it:
At this point [Leinsdorf] had decided to highlight the strings […] whereas Solti had chosen to highlight the brasses. […] At that moment in the film you’re looking down out of a helicopter, past a soldier, onto the waters of the Philippine gulf. There was a peculiarly wonderful acidity to the blue of the ocean that synergized with the metallic brass of Solti’s recording. With Leinsdorf, the strings had none of that brassiness—they were soft and pillowy—and as a result the blue looked dead. It was no longer the same blue.
(Murch, quoted in Ondaatje 2002: 247)