Wagner
Wagner is a composer you instantly feel ashamed about liking. This is not any musically related shame (a la the shame you instantly feel for sort of liking “Toxic“) , but rather to do with his well-publicized anti-semitic tendencies. You can tell yourself that “hate the man, love the art” line infinity times, but that little niggling voice will pop up every time a Wagner piece gets played. And they get played a lot. You are pretty much guaranteed to know the Flight Of The Valkyries:
Wagner - Flight of the Valkyries (from Die Walküre)
which is a piece from his epic (in every sense of that word) opera quadrilogy the Ring Cycle, which consists of over 15 hours of dwarves, gods, heros, swords, deaths and other dramatic stuff which people have been basing books and movies on ever since. In fact, one of the Big Deals about Wagner is his popularization of the Leitmotif, which is a recurring piece of music used to represent a character or object (think of the Imperial March from Star Wars every time Darth Vader pops up his shiny old head). He seriously crammed them into his operas, and after that everyone thought it was awesome and went along with it.
Clearly his music has been pretty inspirational for entertainment ever since he started it, but what does it sound like? Well, remember how I said epic above? Yeah, that pretty much describes it. Wagner liked things big. He worked toward the end of the Romantic period, which is characterized by being very emotional and dramatic instead of precise and dainty, and Wagner takes that Romantic concept to the extreme. He might start out small, but you can tell something big is on its way:
Wagner - Overture to Tannhäuser
Pretty much all of his music was to accompany opera, and that’s fairly clear even when it’s a piece where nobody is actually singing. It’s sounds like someone might start at any second:
Wagner - Overture to Tristan and Isolde