Did Wagner raise hell when his publisher Schott wanted to sell sheet music to "Ride of the Valkyries" separately after the premiere of Die Walküre in 1870? Yes. Did Wagner brutally satirize the tendency of contemporary operetta composer Jacques Offenbach to produce flashy, catchy, sing-along musical numbers? Of course he did. Oh, and, did Wagner begin staging concerts starring "Ride of the Valkyries" in isolation from the rest of its opera and the Ring cycle as a whole in 1863, coinciding with the publication of the opera's libretto in a massive publicity push for the cycle long before he'd written the rest of the score?

Yes, that too.

Wagner was a man of intense passions, and equally intense contradictions. He is, after all, the one who denounced Franz Liszt's Tasso: Lamento e trionfo for its obscene use of "triangles, gong-strokes and rattling of chains"...while plotting a musical part in his own Das Rheingold for SIXTEEN ANVILS. And while Wagner's name and legacy today are inseparable from antisemitism, in the 1860s there was another group that competed with Jews for the position of most-despised target in his music and published notes: the French.

Wagner hated France. He hated its style of comic opera, as opposed to his preference for musical drama--its frivolty, cynicism, giddiness, modernization, modernity. He hated its musical culture of commodification, marketing, betrayal of what Wagner saw as the timeless/anti-modern qualities of art.

And most of all, he hated that Paris kept rejecting him and his music. As recently as 1861, Wagner was still failing to find critical and financial approval in Paris. Meanwhile, composers likes Jacques Offenbach (quadruply hated by Wagner for being a German expat and a Jew) enjoyed immense local success that springboarded them to international fame by doing exactly all the things Wagner so very much hated.

Or at least claimed to hate. Because Wagner was also taking very careful notes about just how Offenbach and his brethren were having such success. In 1870-71, as Wagner and his wife Cosima watched and celebrated the looming German military victory over Paris and France, he wrote up a libretto for an Aristophanes-style comedy he called Eine Kapitulation. Its finale mocked key French cultural heroes. Most notably for present purposes, it introduced Jacques Offenbach emerging from under the stage to lead the cast in a rousing, mocking dance to a trumpet song that was meant to be or to evoke Offenbach's Galop infernal.

You know the Galop infernal. Although probably not under that name: this extract from its own comic opera, the Orphee aux enfers, became so iconic that it's absorbed the name of an entire genre of dance music. Wagner understood the lesson: find the marketable song elements...and market them.

And this is what he did with Der Ring des Nibelungen. He started as early as 1852, staging straight-up readings of the libretto in the homes of well-connected cultural patrons and trend-setters basically as soon as he had finished writing it (long before any music existed). He primed critics to start talking about it, even praising his musical genius...again, before any music to it existed. (Similarly, Wagner's Tristan and Isolde received a fifteen-part review over the 1860-61 period hailing him as a musical genius and the work as the "pinnacle in the genre of musical drama"--four years before it would ever be performed).

From the readings, he moved onto a multi-pronged publicity push in 1862-63: the publication of a provisional score, and the staging of concerts that combined songs from famous older composers, his own earlier work, and previews of his future work. As early as December 1863, Wagner was tossing in "Ride of the Valkyries" and hit extracts from Tristan with performances of major pieces from Die Meistersinger. He was storming up demand for the Ring/Walküre piece long before the opera would come together for its first full performance in 1870.

In the meantime, Wagner had ample room to complain about the commodification and compartmentalization of grand musical opera for profit and publicity. "How repulsive it was for me to have to continually put together concert programs from meager fragments of my dramatic works," he wrote. And...maybe not so much complain: "If I chiseled some extracts out of my scores, I flattered myself with the thought that this way it might not be impossible to draw some of the desired attention onto my work and its associated path."

But the complaints were as much a part of his desired self-image (and, more to the point, the mythologized image of his music he wanted to project) as they were actual complaints. With the final unleashing of Die Walküre onto the world in 1870, Wagner denied his publisher and other performers the right to do what he'd been doing for a decade: promote "Ride of the Valkyries" as a standalone work. Naturally this attracted even more attention in the press to him.

I mentioned at the beginning his refusal to allow Schott to print separate sheet musics to "Valkyries." This is a bigger deal than you might think at first. In the era before musical recordings, sheet music was THE way to distribute set melodies/scores to works, as opposed to older traditions of circulating sets of melody and sets of lyrics, and matching one to another often on the fly or arising out of custom. And while Wagner hedged on allowing the score of "Valkyries" to be produced alone, other composers--multiple--were doing the legwork for it to be propagated to an even greater audience. That is, they were adapting it for piano-only. This brought access to the set melody into countless more homes and gatherings than otherwise.

And those who did make it to the theatre to see Die Walküre in person were ever more impressed by the staging of the Valkyries' ride in particular--from initial demands that the Valkyries be represented by actual riders on horses instead of vague artistic depictions, to projections to simulate flying, and onward from there. It was definitely a "show piece" within the opera, not just extracted from it.

At the same time as Wagner worked to promote Ring on multiple fronts, other opera composers were experimenting with other ways to get their "hit single" to the public--for example, a French composer whom Wagner actually appreciated, Georges Bizet, placed the two catchiest strains in Carmen (1875) right upfront as the prelude to act 1, the very opening notes, despite the two songs occurring absolutely nowhere near act 1. You know these, too. And the point being, there's a reason for that.

Some of that reason is that the various songs discussed and linked here are, within the preferences shaped by the traditions of Western music, catchy and good. Some of that is the snowball effect--once something has a cultural foothold in the first place, it becomes a reference point or familiar, go-to choice in pop culture uses beyond the original. But a lot of it owes to the efforts of Wagner and his contemporaries at testing different ways to promote their work.

To add a brief note to the very comprehensive remarks from sunagainstgold:

By the time Wagner writes the Ring, he is trying to reform opera (he calls the reformed art form "music drama") with innovations that he has conceived. He wants to get away from the old system, so-called "number opera," in which an opera is made up of smaller pieces with a distinct beginning and end: arias, duets, etc. (Think Mozart, Rossini, and indeed the young Richard Wagner.) Instead, he wants an act of an opera, I mean music drama, to be as continuous as an act of a spoken play. He also has a theory about "endless melody." This means that instead of using regular repeating patterns, such as most songs have even today, the melody should constantly flow and change in response to the changing words and dramatic situation.

All of this means that there are long stretches of the Ring that don't lend themselves to excerpting. But the Ride of the Valkyries does. It's also built around regular repeating phrases and sections. It's an old-style piece in that sense, as s.u.g suggests --and the wider audience has remained quite receptive to that old-style approach.

So we might turn the question around: Why did the rest of the Ring not become as hugely popular as the Ride of the Valkyries? It may be because it lacks those (audience-friendly) qualities of excerptability and regularity, though quite intentionally.