Also sprach Zarathustra, Tone Poem, Op. 30

Program notes

About the Work

Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra) is Strauss’s boldest attempt to put philosophy into sound. Composed in 1896, when he was thirty-one and at the height of his powers as a writer of tone poems, it takes its title and inspiration from Friedrich Nietzsche’s prose-poem of the same name, in which the prophet Zarathustra descends from his mountain solitude to teach humanity about the Übermensch and the overcoming of received values. Strauss did not attempt to set the book to music line by line; rather, as he explained it, he wished to convey in music an idea of the development of the human race, through its religious and scientific phases, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman. He gave the score subtitles drawn from Nietzsche’s chapters, and these became a loose programme.

The work falls into a continuous sequence of sections, played without a break: after the celebrated opening ‘Sonnenaufgang’ (Sunrise), the music passes through ‘Of the Backworldsmen’ (Von den Hinterweltlern), with its hymn-like evocation of religious faith; ‘Of the Great Longing’ (Von der großen Sehnsucht); ‘Of Joys and Passions’; a ‘Grave Song’; ‘Of Science’ (Von der Wissenschaft), built on an austere fugue that gathers all twelve notes of the chromatic scale; ‘The Convalescent’; the swirling waltz of ‘The Dance-Song’ (Das Tanzlied); and the mysterious bell-tolls of the ‘Nachtwandlerlied’ (Song of the Night-Wanderer). The premiere took place in Frankfurt on 27 November 1896, with Strauss himself conducting, and the piece was an immediate success.

The opening minutes are, of course, world-famous, even to listeners who have never heard the rest: Stanley Kubrick’s use of the Sunrise in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) made those rising trumpet calls a universal shorthand for awe and the dawn of consciousness. But the music after the fanfare is where Strauss’s real argument unfolds: a struggle between two tonal worlds, the key of C (representing nature, the cosmos, the physical world) and the key of B (the human, the spiritual, the questing). That opposition is never resolved. At the very end, the orchestra settles into B major in the high strings while the lower strings pluck a C: two keys sounding at once, the cosmos and humanity unreconciled. This ‘world riddle’ close, refusing the satisfying final cadence the ear expects, is one of the most quietly radical gestures in late-Romantic music: a vast philosophical poem that ends not with an answer but with a question.

What to Listen For

The Sunrise is the obvious place to begin, and it deserves fresh ears. Out of an almost subsonic rumble of organ, contrabassoon and double basses, the void before creation, a solitary trumpet sounds the rising figure C–G–C, answered by the full orchestra and crowned by tremendous strokes on the timpani and a blazing C major chord. Strauss gives it to us three times, each more overwhelming, before the music plunges into the human drama. Listen for that bare interval, the rising fifth and octave: it is the work’s primal cell, and it returns throughout.

From there, follow the music as a journey of moods rather than a story. In ‘Of the Backworldsmen’ the divided lower strings intone a hushed, churchly theme, and horns and organ quote the plainchant ‘Credo in unum Deum’: religion as one of humanity’s early answers. ‘Of Science’ is the cerebral heart: a slow fugue whose subject deliberately uses all twelve chromatic notes, knotting the orchestra into dense counterpoint that represents the labour of the intellect. When the music finally breaks free into ‘The Convalescent’ and then ‘The Dance-Song,’ notice the solo violin spinning a Viennese waltz. This is Strauss the man of the theatre and the ballroom reasserting himself, life and sensuality answering abstraction.

Save your closest attention for the ending. After the midnight bell tolls twelve in the ‘Nachtwandlerlied,’ the orchestra drifts upward into a serene B major in the high woodwinds and violins, but underneath, the lower strings keep pricking out Cs, pizzicato, refusing to join that key. The two tonalities hang unreconciled in the air, and the work simply fades on this unanswered question. Do not wait for a resolution; the absence of one is the point.