Introduction Put in simplest terms, this thesis is an examination of classical music and Hollywood film. It discusses an area of study that resides at the intersection of several related, overlapping fields, including semiotics, intertextuality theory, popular musicology, film studies, film musicology, and popular culture studies. This multidisciplinary study focuses on three pieces of classical music: the ‘Introduction’ to Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra; Richard Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ from his opera The Valkyrie; and the ‘Liebestod’ from Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. Appropriate aspects of the above theory are developed and filtered through these case histories. This thesis proposes that these compositions, and the role they play in popular culture, have considerably evolved since they were composed in the late nineteenth century. In fact, Strauss’s and Wagner’s respective music have evolved to a stage well beyond that apparently assumed by most media academics, including both musicologists and film scholars. Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra and Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ in particular are good examples of a previously unidentified media phenomenon: the ‘metaleitmotif’, a self-referential iconic particle of popular culture. To the best of my knowledge, the approach to these texts in this thesis is new, in that an investigation into the use of repertoire classical music and film, and how one affects the other, has never been undertaken. Although this thesis is heavily grounded in the methodology of structuralist, semiotic textual analysis, the particular combination of semiotic and textual analytic approaches is new to all three of the theoretical disciplines that support this thesis: classical music is rarely analysed as popular music, and film music is rarely analysed as popular music video. The texts in all three case histories are comprised of canonical repertoire classical music and Hollywood 1 film, and this multimedia textual combination is analysed through aspects of the following three theoretical lenses: intertextuality theory, popular music and music video theory, and film music theory (as an adjunct of film theory). All three of these theoretical disciplines can be brought to bear on exactly the same media texts, but naturally from radically different, if not opposing, ideological backgrounds. This thesis will follow the 1 With the exception of Fellini’s 8½, European and Asian cinematic texts were excluded for reasons of economy, although several Australian films are analysed.