Although the topic of war may not be a fashionable dinner party topic these days, its horrors, history and heroes have fascinated us for centuries. This collection includes music about war, music for television and exciting and memorable music from some of the greatest war movies of all time.
 
 Some of the greatest war films appropriated famous pieces of classical music, and in so doing rendered these pieces almost inseparable from the images they accompanied. Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries is used in Apocalypse Now to accompany a frightening attack in a Vietcong village by American helicopters. Platoon, also set in the Vietnam War, used Barber’s Adagio to wonderful effect. The use of such an introspective, melancholy work in the context of a brutal and bloody film also demonstrates how war film music does not have to be a noisy march! The delicate Cavatina, for guitar, is indelibly associated with The Deer Hunter, a Vietnam war film of extreme savagery and violence. The Thin Red Line also contrasts the brutality and horror of war with a classical work of serene beauty—Fauré’s In Paradisum. Albinoni’s Adagio is no less poignant as the main theme to Peter Weir’s Gallipoli.