"THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA," TONE-POEM: Op. 30
Also sprach Zarathustra, Tondichtung (frei nach Friedr. Nietzsche) für grosses Orchester, was begun in February, finished in August, 1896. It is, as the title implies, a tonal rendering of impressions derived from Also sprach Zarathustra ("Thus Spake Zarathustra"), the remarkable philosophico-romantic fantasy of Friedrich Nietzsche. [149] Strauss's music is, he says, frei nach Nietzsche; that is to say, treated "freely" after Nietzsche. "I did not," he has declared, "intend to write philosophical music or portray Nietzsche's great work musically. I meant to convey musically an idea of the development 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 Over-man (Übermensch)." A large order, one would say. Whatever Strauss may have meant by "philosophical music," he has certainly, whether he intended to or not, composed a score which is utterly and hopelessly incomprehensible unless one knows what its relationship is, at every point, with Nietzsche's book—a knowledge which Strauss has considerately assisted by prefixing to each section of the score an indication of the particular part of the book to which the music refers. If this is not translating philosophy into tones (or seeking to do so), if it is not an endeavor to find musical equivalents for various phases of a particular philosophy, a particular chain of ideas, then we shall have, as it seems, to discover a new significance in very ordinary words. This is not the place to discuss the pros and cons of the matter, or its aspect from the stand-point of musical æsthetics; the foregoing observations have been offered only for the purpose of clearing the ground, and to prepare the way for the statement which has now to be made: that a comprehension of this particular tone-poem, even with a knowledge of the score and its annotations, is impossible without a pretty complete understanding of Nietzsche's book and of his outlook upon life and ideas—an understanding which it is hardly feasible to attempt to communicate here. It is at least possible, though, to set forth certain of the essentials of his philosophical stand-point and of the characteristics of his Zarathustra, as a preparation for an acquaintance with the tone-poem of Strauss; and this cannot be better accomplished than by quoting from Mr. James Huneker's vivid and sympathetic study of the man and his views:
"What does Nietzsche teach? What is his central doctrine, divested of its increments of anti-Semitism, anti-Wagnerism, anti-Christianity, and anti-everything-else? Simply a doctrine as old as the first invertebrate organism which floated in torrid seas beneath a blazing moon: Egoism, individualism, personal freedom, self-hood. He is the apostle of the ego.... He is a proclaimer of the rank animalism of man. He believes in the body and not in the soul of theology....
"It is in Also sprach Zarathustra that the genius of Nietzsche is best studied. Like the Buddhistic Tripitaka, it is a book of highly colored Oriental aphorisms, interrupted by lofty lyric outbursts. It is an ironic, enigmatic, rhetorical rhapsody, the Third Part of a half-mad 'Faust.' In it may be seen flowing all the currents of modern cultures and philosophies, and, if it teaches anything at all, it teaches the wisdom and beauty of air, sky, waters, and earth, and of laughter, not Pantagruelian, but 'holy laughter.' The love of earth is preached in rapturous accents. A Dionysian ecstasy anoints the lips of this latter-day Sibyl on his tripod when he speaks of earth. He is intoxicated with the fulness of its joys. No gloomy monasticism, no denial of the will to live, no futile thinking about thinking—so despised by Goethe—no denial of grand realities, may be found in the curriculum of this Bacchantic philosopher. A pantheist, he is also a poet and seer like William Blake, and marvels at the symbol of nature, 'the living garment of the Deity'—Nietzsche's deity, of course.... It is the history of his soul, as 'Leaves of Grass' is Whitman's—there are some curious parallelisms between these two subjective epics. It is intimate, yet hints at universality; it contains some of Amiel's introspection and some of Baudelaire's morbidity—half-mad, yet exhorting, comforting; Hamlet and John Bunyan."
When Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra was performed in Boston in the year following its completion (October 30, 1897), Mr. W. F. Apthorp wrote for the programme notes of the Boston Symphony Orchestra an analysis and exposition of the work which for completeness and precision could not well be surpassed. I reproduce it, in part, herewith:
"On a fly-leaf of the score is printed the following excerpt from Nietzsche's book:
"'ZARATHUSTRA'S PREFACE' (Friedrich Nietzsche).
"When Zarathustra was thirty years old, he left his home and the sea of his home and went to the mountains. Here he enjoyed his mind and his solitude, and did not tire thereof for ten years. But at last his heart was changed, and one morning he rose with the dawn, stood before the sun, and spake thus to him:
"'Thou great star! What were thy happiness, if thou hadst not him whom thou dost illumine! For ten years hast thou come here up to my cave: thou wouldst have had enough of thy light and of this road, without me, my eagle, and my serpent.
"'But we awaited thee every morning, relieved thee of thy superfluity, and blessed thee therefor.
"'See! I am tired of my wisdom, like the bee which has gathered too much honey; I need hands that stretch out.
"'I would make gifts and divide, till the wise among men have once more grown glad of their folly, and the poor, once more, of their riches. For this I must go down to the depths: as thou dost of evenings, when thou goest behind the sea and bringest light even to the lower world, thou over-rich star!
"'Like thee, I must go down,[150] as men call it, to them to whom I would descend. So bless me, then, thou placid eye, that canst see an over-great happiness without envy.
"'Bless thy beaker, which would fain overflow, that the water may flow out golden therefrom and carry the reflection of thy ecstasy everywhere!
"'See! This beaker would fain become empty again, and Zarathustra would fain become a man again.
"'—Thus began Zarathustra's downfall.'
"In Nietzsche's book, Zarathustra goes from the mountains down to men and preaches: 'I teach you the Over-man. Man is something that must be overcome. What have ye done to overcome him?... The Over-man is the meaning of the Earth.... Man is a rope, made fast between the Beast and the Over-man—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous passing-over, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous staying-behind, a dangerous shuddering and standing-still. What is great in Man is that he is a bridge and not a purpose: what can be loved in Man is that he is a transition and a downfall.[151]... What good and evil is, that no one yet knows: unless it be he who creates! But this one is he who creates Man's goal, and gives the Earth its meaning: he alone creates it that something shall be good and evil.'
"The great problem Zarathustra tries to solve in his speech is: to teach men the deification of Life; all human values must be 'transvalued,' and therewith a new order of the universe created, 'beyond good and evil.' Zarathustra himself is this 'world beyond,' he is the freest of the free, who descries in all Becoming only a yearning after his own self and teaching, which yearning alone can overcome the 'simian' world and 'simian' Mankind, slaves of traditional convention, and offer to Man—not the Joy of Life, for there is no such thing, but—the 'Fulness of Life,' in the joy of the senses, in the triumphant exuberance of vitality, in the pure, lofty naturalness of the Antique—in short, in the fusion of God, World, and Ego. This art of life of Zarathustra's shall be shared by Mankind; herein shall Zarathustra be dissolved in Mankind and 'go down!' Thus are also to be explained the significant closing words of the fourth chapter of 'Twilight of the Idols'[152]: 'Mid-day: the moment of the shortest shadow; the end of the longest error. The culminating-point of Humanity: Incipit Zarathustra.'
"Taking the excerpt from 'Zarathustra's Preface,' reprinted on the fly-leaf of his score, as his poetic text, Strauss has illustrated it in his own way.... Perhaps it were best ... not to attempt a metaphysico-romantic analysis of the work, but to leave this to the listener's imagination, after putting before him the composer's preface. It will be well, however, to give some sub-captions which Strauss has put at various points of the score.
"Just after the first great fortissimo outburst of the full orchestra and organ on the chord of C major,[153] stands, 'OF THE DWELLERS IN THE REAR-WORLD.' These were fools and pietarians, who sought the solution in Religion. Once Zarathustra, too, cast his delusion beyond Humankind, like all dwellers in the Rear-World. 'The World then seemed to be the work of a suffering and tormented God. The World then seemed to me a dream, a God's poem.... I, too, once cast my delusion beyond Humankind.... Ah, ye brothers, this God, whom I created, was the work of a man, and—an insanity, like all Gods.'
"Further on we find the sub-caption, 'OF THE GREAT YEARNING,' over a strenuous ascending passage in the 'cellos and bassoons, answered by the wood-wind. This refers to the following passage in Nietzsche's book: 'Wouldst thou not weep, not weep out thy purple despondency, then must thou sing, O my soul!... Sing with boisterous song, till all seas grow still, that they may listen to thy yearning.... Already glowest thou and dreamest, already drinkest thou thirstily at all deep-sounding Springs of Comfort, already does thy despondency find its rest in the beatitude of songs to come!'
"Over the expressive, pathetic cantilena in C minor of the second violins, oboes, and horn, stands, 'OF JOYS AND PASSIONS'.
"Further on we come to the 'GRAVE-SONG,' a tenderly expressive cantilena in the oboe, over the 'Yearning-motive' in the 'cellos and bassoons: 'Yonder is the island of graves, the silent one; yonder, too, are the graves of my youth. Thither will I carry an evergreen wreath of Life. Resolving this in my heart, I journeyed across the sea. O ye sights and apparitions of my youth! O all ye love-glances, ye divine moments! How soon are ye dead to me! I think of you to-day as of my dead ones.... To kill me did they wring your necks, ye song-birds of my hopes! Yea, at you, ye dearest ones, did malice ever aim its shafts—to hit my heart....'
"Over the fugued passage, beginning in the 'cellos and double-basses, stands, 'OF SCIENCE.' It is to be noted, as a musical curiosity, that the subject of this fugue contains all the diatonic and chromatic degrees of the scale....
"Considerably further on, where a violent passage in the strings (beginning in the 'cellos and violas) soars up, ... stands, 'THE CONVALESCENT.'... 'Let us kill the Spirit of Weight!...'
"So learn to laugh your way out of yourselves! Uplift your hearts, ye good dancers, high! higher! And forget not the good laughter! This crown to the laughers, this rose-wreath crown: to you, my brothers, do I dedicate this crown! I have pronounced Laughter holy; ye Higher Men, learn—to laugh!... One must have Chaos in himself, to give birth to a dancing star....' Then the 'DANCE-SONG' begins, ushered in by trills in the flutes and clarinets.
"Much further on, after a fortissimo stroke of the bell, comes 'THE SONG OF THE NIGHT-WANDERER.' In the later editions of his book Nietzsche gave the corresponding chapter the title, 'Drunken Song.' On the twelve strokes of the 'heavy, heavy humming-bell (Brummglocke),' he wrote the following lines:
"'ONE!
"'O Man, take heed!'"'TWO!
"'What speaks the deep midnight?'"'THREE!
"'I have slept, I have slept—'"'FOUR!
"'I have awaked out of a deep dream:—'"'FIVE!
"'The world is deep,'"'SIX!
"'And deeper than the day thought for.'"'SEVEN!
"'Deep is its woe,—'"'EIGHT!
"'Joy, deeper still than heart-sorrow.'"'Nine!
"'Woe speaks: Vanish!'"'TEN!
"'Yet all joy wants eternity, ...'"'ELEVEN!
"'Wants deep, deep eternity!'"'TWELVE!'
"The composition ends mystically in two keys—in B major in the high wood-wind and violins, in C major in the basses pizzicati. Zarathustra's downfall!"
"DON QUIXOTE," FANTASTIC VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF KNIGHTLY CHARACTER: Op. 35
The full title of this work (composed in 1897) is: Don Quixote (Introduzione, Tema con Variazioni, e Finale): Fantastische Variationen über ein Thema ritterlichen Characters. That is to say, it is in the form of a theme with variations, the theme is of "knightly character," and the variations are "fantastic." From the programmatic point of view, it is a series of tone-pictures in which are set forth, upon a musical canvas of singular vividness, the figures of Cervantes' Knight of the Rueful Countenance and his squire Sancho Panza, and their memorable adventures in quest of knightly glory. The orchestral score contains no programme or explanatory notes, save two superscriptions printed above the dual portions of the theme, identifying the first part with Don Quixote, the second part with Sancho Panza; yet Strauss, with his inveterate lack of consistency in such matters, has annotated the pianoforte arrangement of his music with a completeness which he has capriciously denied to the orchestral score, placing at the head of each variation a verbal clew to the particular adventure which the music aims to describe. From these it is possible to follow its meaning in fairly ample detail.
The music consists of an Introduction, a Theme, ten variations, and a Finale, continuous throughout. Each variation is concerned with some incident in Cervantes' novel. A solo 'cello represents, or "enacts," Don Quixote; a solo viola, Sancho Panza.