INSPIRED BY THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA
INSPIRED BY THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA
German composer Richard Strauss, best known for his operas Salomé (1905), Elektra (1909), and Der Rosenkavalier (1911), began his musical career composing impressionistic tone poems. The best-known, Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), was, according to Strauss, “freely based on Friedrich Nietzsche.” When it premiered in Frankfurt in November 1896, Thus Spoke Zarathustra stunned audiences with its now-famous opening depicting the sunrise. Bold trumpets announce an open chord in C major, ascend to the fifth, and then climb to C an octave higher before resting in C minor. This simple musical gesture is followed by a foreboding series of tympani booms. Painting an epic panorama of the cosmos, the trumpet blasts ascend repeatedly and finally resolve to C major-two octaves above the opening note. Throughout the piece, Strauss makes use of C major to symbolize nature and the cosmos, while the neighboring and dissonant key of B stands for humanity. The clash between humans and the rest of the universe forms the music s core.
Strauss was in many ways the perfect man to represent Nietzsche’s book in quintessentially modern program music (instrumental music inspired by or suggestive of a narrative or setting, a kind of precursor to the modern film score). Canadian piano prodigy Glenn Gould said of Strauss’s work:
It presents and substantiates an argument which transcends all the dogmatisms of art—all questions of style and taste and idiom—all the frivolous, effete preoccupations of the chronologist. It presents to us an example of the man who makes richer his own time by not being of it, who speaks for all generations by being of none. It is an ultimate argument of individuality—the argument that a man can create his own synthesis of time without being bound by the conformities that time imposes.
Just as that other great individualist Nietzsche came to be misappropriated by Hitler and National Socialism, Strauss too was forced to work for the Nazis; he served for a short time as the president of their Reichsmusikkammer (state music office). In 1948 a “denazification” tribunal exonerated him of all collaboration with the National Socialists.
Director Stanley Kubrick made Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra the fitting and memorable musical centerpiece of his 1968 cinematic masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. For the film’s story, Kubrick (Lolita, Dr. Strangelove) collaborated with British author Arthur C. Clarke, from whom he commissioned a novel about man’s place in the universe. In the 1960s Clarke was a member of a triumvirate of science-fiction writers that also included Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. Clarke had already begun to expand to novel length his 1951 short story “The Sentinel,” about man’s first contact with intelligent life beyond Earth, when Kubrick offered him the commission.
Kubrick’s film begins with a wide, Cinerama shot of the aligned moon, sun, and Earth, accompanied by Strauss’s stirring opening bars. The music returns in the film’s “Dawn of Man” segment when a tribe of apes-aided somehow by a perfect, black monolith of mysterious origin-discover they can use bones as weapons and thus defeat a rival tribe. Strauss, in his program note for Thus Spoke Zarathustra, could have been describing Kubrick and Clarke’s vision:
I did not intend to write philosophical music or to portray in music Nietzsche’s great work. I wished to convey by means of music an idea of the development of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of its development, religious and scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the superman. The whole symphonic poem is intended as an homage to Nietzsche’s genius, which found its greatest expression in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
2001’s final shot is legendary: A fetus floats star-like in the gorgeously textured, womb-like galaxy. Of all moments in Kubrick’s innovative, high-concept film, this one is the most reminiscent of Nietzsche’s philosophy. In Zarathustra, the poet-philosopher describes the prophet, as he emerges enlightened from his mountain cave, as having become a child. And in Zarathustra’s tale of the “metamorphoses of the spirit” (p. 25), the spirit changes into a camel, then a lion, and finally a child. “The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred Yes-saying” (p. 26). Nietzsche also has Zarathustra utter maxims that ring with cosmic import, such as “one must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star” (p. 13). Strauss’s music swells one final time, and as it rises two octaves it underscores Nietzsche’s and Kubrick’s narrative arcs.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated Kubrick for an Oscar for his direction and Clarke and Kubrick for their screenplay, which was nearly devoid of dialogue. The film was also nominated for art direction, and it won the award for special visual effects, which hold up beautifully even today. In 1996 the American Film Institute celebrated its hundred-year anniversary by selecting the top hundred films made since the inception of American cinema. 2001: A Space Odyssey came in at twenty-two.