( 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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”. 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. (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 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). 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. 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. 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.
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