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Also Sprach Zarathustra is one of the worlds most popular pieces of music, so yes, you will likely find many various ones done by many people (I will say: NOT a good example of the average ability to find different recordings of something)
Life of a Song
Also sprach Zarathustra — a fanfare that has echoed down the years
Kubrick and Copland are among those who have felt the force of Richard Strauss’s piece
Also sprach Zarathustra’ plays during the scene in ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ when the apes make a great leap forward
David Cheal September 28 2020
It is of course not actually a song. And the bit that everyone knows — the opening section — is only a small part of a half-hour tone poem by German composer Richard Strauss. But, thanks in particular to its use in Stanley Kubrick’s film
2001: A Space Odyssey, the fanfare from
Also sprach Zarathustra has become a self-contained piece of music, in Kubrick’s film heralding The Dawn of Man, and widely used in popular culture as a signifier of impending glories.
Strauss wrote
Also sprach Zarathustra (“Thus Spake Zarathustra”) in 1896, a musical response to the philosophical treatise of the same title by Friedrich Nietzsche, which was in turn a response to a crisis in European thought — the rise of science, the demise of religion. In Nietzsche’s work, Zarathustra — a fictionalised version of the Persian prophet Zoroaster — journeys in search of meaning and enlightenment, spending 10 years up a mountain, urging humanity to progress to become an “Übermensch” (superman). (It was the first work in which Nietzsche declared that “God is dead.”) Strauss’s work is not an attempt to trace the narrative of Nietzsche’s work, rather to reflect its competing forces — nature, mankind, chaos, life, joy.
In the opening fanfare, low-humming organ pedal, cellos and double basses create a sense of potentiality, before the trumpets sound out those first octave-spanning three notes (sometimes called the “nature” motif, repeated throughout the piece), then joined by the rest of the orchestra in a burst of ecstasy. Conductor Marin Alsop (in an essay cleverly titled
Alsop Sprach Zarathustra) points to Strauss’s use of the key of C major: “the universal key”. It’s a “song” in the key of everything, employing a musical form — the fanfare — that has been traced back to the 14th century, when it was used to signal the start of a hunt.
The piece was hugely influential: Alsop points to similarities with later works such as Aaron Copland’s
Fanfare for the Common Man, which uses the same triad of notes. There are echoes, too, in the film music of John Williams, especially — and appropriately — his
Superman fanfare.
When Kubrick was making
2001, he initially planned to use specially composed music by
Alex North, who had worked on Kubrick’s
Spartacus and wrote a “sunrise” sequence for
2001 that was suitably epic. But Kubrick, being Kubrick, scrapped the score (without telling North, who only discovered what had happened at the premiere), sent a studio employee out to scour the record shops for classical music, and eventually settled on pre-written music by Johann Strauss, Gyorgy Ligeti and Richard Strauss, with
Also sprach Zarathustra appearing at crucial moments of the film’s (and mankind’s) progress. (
2001 uses a recording by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karajan.) Strauss’s piece — or at least the first two minutes of it — entered popular consciousness. (The work of Nietzsche made a further inroad into popular culture in David Bowie’s 1971 song “Oh! You Pretty Things”, with its lyric about making way for the “Homo superior”.)
In 1974, the piece was subjected to a rather more eccentric treatment. Formed in 1970 as an art school project by lecturer and composer Gavin Bryars in response to classical music’s “tuxedo Nazis”, the Portsmouth Sinfonia was made up of players who either couldn’t play their instruments very well, or could barely play at all (its founders have denied the suggestion that total musical inability was an essential qualification. They just weren’t interested in perfection).
They tackled popular classics, including Rossini’s
William Tell Overture (with Brian Eno on clarinet) and, most famously (or infamously),
Also sprach Zarathustra. Their version isn’t just imperfect: it is gloriously, uninhibitedly and liberatingly ragged, the trumpets straining and failing to reach the high notes, coughing and lurching, the whole thing collapsing in a triumph of chaos. A cult classic was born. Would Nietzsche have liked it? Possibly. After all, he did write: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”
Around the same time, the piece was given a radical but more technically adept treatment by Brazilian jazz-funk keyboardist and producer Eumir Deodato. With a top-notch band of international players that included Billy Cobham on drums, Stanley Clarke on electric bass and Ray Barretto on congas, in 1973 he recorded a version that seethes and broods, its horns syncopated, electric piano vamping. Many ham-fisted attempts have been made to fuse classical and popular music, but Deodato’s is a triumph. And a few years later it was used to extraordinary effect in Hal Ashby’s film
Being There, in the sequence where Peter Sellers’s Chance ventures outside his house for the first time in decades and marvels at the scenes that greet him: deprivation, squalor, destruction — and life. The music reflects his astonishment; this is the dawn of a man.
Popular culture has seized on
Also sprach Zarathustra as an instantly recognisable theme and meme.
Elvis Presley used it as the intro music for his shows. It’s been used many times in
The Simpsons: it plays when Homer drifts through space as an adult version of Kubrick’s “star child”, and when Homer, dreaming that he is one of Kubrick’s apes, uses the
2001 monolith as a back-scratcher while apes around him discover tools and fire. As Nietzsche might have written: “Ecce Homer.”
What are your memories of ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: MGM; Naxos; Warner Brothers; JIP Records; Sony Music Jazz
Picture credit: Getty
