Also sprach Zarathustra, Tone poem for large orchestra, free after Nietzsche, Opus 30 

• Composition and premiere: Strauss began Also sprach Zarathustra in Munich on February 4, 1896, and completed it on August 24. Strauss himself conducted the Municipal Orchestra of Frankfurt-am-Main in the first performance on November 27, 1896. 
• First Tanglewood performance: August 10, 1939, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Serge Koussevitzky conducting. 
• First Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra performance: July 30, 1948, Eleazar de Carvalho conducting. 

Surely no major philosopher has ever had a closer relationship to music and musicians than Friedrich Nietzsche, and no work of philosophy has inspired more musical compositions than his best-known work, Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus spake Zarathustra), which served as inspiration for songs by Schoenberg, Delius, Medtner, and Taneyev, as well as larger works by Mahler (his Third Symphony), Delius (A Mass of Life), and Strauss. The last composer who could be called an intellectual, Strauss nevertheless made the courageous decision to use Nietzsche’s philosophical ruminations as basis for a symphonic poem. In so doing, he chose one particular theme of the work, which he described after the first Berlin performance: “I did not intend to write philosophical music or portray Nietzsche’s great work musically. I meant rather to convey in music an idea of the evolution of the human race from its origin, through the various phases of development, religious as well as scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch.” 

For his musical setting, Strauss conceived one enormous movement that has little in common with traditional musical forms; instead he selected a limited number of section titles from Nietzsche’s work and arranged them in a way that made possible musical variety and development of material, quite unconcerned that they were presented in an order quite different from the philosopher’s. The most important of the unifying musical ideas—it comes up again and again—is the use of two keys, C and B, whose tonic notes are as close together as they can be melodically, though harmonically they are very far apart, to represent the natural world on the one hand and the inquiring spirit of man on the other. Time and again these two tonalities will be heard in close succession—or, indeed, even simultaneously. This frequent pairing helps justify the very ending of the work, which has been hotly debated since the first performance. 

At the head of the score Strauss printed the opening lines of Nietzsche’s prologue, in which Zarathustra observes the sunrise and announces his decision to descend to the world of mankind from the lonely spot high up in the mountains where he has passed ten years. The opening of the tone poem is a magnificent evocation of the primeval Sunrise, with an important three-note rising figure in the trumpets representing Nature and the most glorious possible cadence in C (alternating major and minor at first before closing solidly in the major). That trumpet theme is the single most important melodic motive of the work. 

The next sections of Strauss’s tone poems are entitled Von den Hinterweltlern (“On the Afterworldly”), the most primitive state of man, which is, to Nietzsche, the condition of those who put their faith in an afterlife rather than seek fulfillment in this life; Von der grossen Sehnsucht (“On the Great Longing”), depicting man’s yearning to move beyond ignorance and superstition; Von den Freuden- und Leidenschaften (“Of Pleasures and Passions”), which links man’s sensual life with Nature rather than his spirit; and Das Grablied (“The Tomb Song”). Then come Von der Wissenschaft (“On Science”; and what, in musical terms, could be more scientific than a fugue?); Der Genesende (“The Convalescent”); and Das Tanzlied (“The Dancing Song”), which begins as an amiable and graceful waltz but soon builds in energy and vehemence, leading to the climax of the score, as a great bell tolls twelve times. 

Strauss marks this passage Nachtwandlerlied (“Night Wanderer’s Song”). The bell rings every four measures, ever more softly, as the music settles onto a chord of C major, only to slip, with magical effect, into a gentle, bright B major for the coda, in which the violins present a sweet theme representing “spiritual freedom.” But this B is softly but insistently undercut by cellos and basses, pizzicato, with the rising three-note “Nature” motive, as if to say: Earth—the natural world—abides in spite of all. Four more times the upper instruments reiterate their chord of B, only to find that the bottom strings repeat the C with quiet obstinacy—an ending that reflects Strauss’s carefully worked out opposition of the keys B and C throughout the course of the entire work. 

STEVEN LEDBETTER 

Steven Ledbetter, a freelance writer and lecturer on music, was program annotator of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1998.