“Cinema’s integration of image, word, and music promised a fulfillment of the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, or ‘total work of art,’ which Wagner propagated at one stage of his career. His informal system of assigning leitmotifs to characters and themes became a defining trait of film scores. And Hollywood has drawn repeatedly from Wagner’s gallery of mythic archetypes: his gods, heroes, sorcerers, and questers.” – The New Yorker