The Music and horses

Many proverbs and aphorisms make the association between horses and poetry or liken their movements to dance. There is nothing more thrilling than a horse’s motion set to music, as is done in many pieces performed in concert, and in vaulting competitions as well. But a group of horses at a gallop also exudes power, you feel the ground tremble, the pounding of the hooves and the air whistling by the rider’ s ears. This is the scene that many would have experienced when he cavalry charged an enemy army, beginning some 5,000 years ago in Turkey with Hittites, the first to use horses in battle. The two best known opera arias inspired by horses are by a pair of composers with totally different styles: the joyful Gioacchino Rossini and the implacable Richard Wagner. Rossini, the great composer from Pesaro, evoked the gallop of the cavalry in the overture to William Tell, his opera on the Swiss people freeing themselves from Austrian domination. As for Richard Wagner’s interpretation of the horse’s power, it is found in his renowned Ride of the Valkyries, which was also used as the soundtrack for the famous helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola’s celebrated film.