Richard Strauss – Also sprach Zarathustra

The opening fanfare from Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra” (“Thus spoke Zarathustra”) is known to everyone since it was ‘rediscovered’ in Stanley Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey” and consequently employed time and again in TV ads. At the turn of the century, however, renowned music critics asked themselves whether they should even bother to listen to the rest of the work, a symphonic poem, which – they presumed – was a narration in music of Nietzsche’s book. In what is probably his most famous orchestral composition, Strauss, however, freely associated the words of the Saxon poet and philosopher when putting them into music by using the key of C major to depict nature, and the greatly contrasting key of B major for humanity.