Excerpting Wagner loses dramatic irony

Wagner was ambivalent about excerpting his works: extracting pieces like the 'Ride of the Valkyries' was brilliant marketing that spread his fame, but pulling out a passage such as the entry of the gods into Valhalla strips it of dramatic irony—what sounds grandiose and uplifting is actually an empty, hollow spectacle masking a catastrophe—so Wagner is richest experienced whole as theater.