Richard Strauss was no conservative

With the ardent zeal characteristic of the freshly converted, I found myself channelling waves of anger towards Stanley Kubrick. The closing bars of Also sprach Zarathustra had utterly turned my head, transforming what had been my passing interest in the music of Richard Strauss into an infectious bout of Strauss monomania. Kubrick’s exquisitely consummated marriage of music and image, however, dared to hoodwink our collective consciousness into believing that Strauss’s 1896 Nietzsche-inspired tone-poem is actually sci-fi space music – more Star Wars than Übermensch – a reality that felt unmerited and unjust.

The opening sequence of Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey used the trumpet and timpani fanfares that launch Also sprach Zarathustra to underscore cosmic glimpses of the sun rising from behind the earth, but the celestial immobility of Strauss’s concluding bars – harmonically ambiguous woodwind chords drifting towards the heavens – have more to say about music’s evolution during the next century than has been generally recognised, rubbishing the truism that constructing a pathway through the birth pangs of musical modernism that wilfully sidesteps Richard Strauss is surprisingly easy to do.