Nietzsche's prose poem "Zarathustra says so" was completed in 1885. Nepal adopted Zarathustra, a mysterious Persian who lived around 600 BC, as the spokesman of his philosophy and his views on war, chastity, women, religion and science. The prophet lived a cave life far away from human beings, and he came back from time to time to teach believers his experience of seclusion and meditation. One of his mottos to mankind is "ruled by the best people (or superman)"; "People can be conquered. A person is great because he is not a goal, but a bridge to achieve it ... Superman should be the embodiment of the earth. " However, with the arrival of major events, this theory was eclipsed. In just 40 years, German militarism made Europe suffer two wars. Zarathustra tried his best to explain all this, but in Nietzsche's book, he became an idealized figure during his recovery. He eloquently stated his philosophical thoughts in the form of poems, which described mountains and sunrises, dancers and midnight bells, and also talked about will and eternity. In this passage, he inserted an eleven-line poem. The first sentence is "Be careful, man", which was used by Mahler in a movement of his third symphony. What attracts composers is Nietzsche, a romantic image expressed in gorgeous language. Three masters of musical romanticism after Wagner (Strauss of 1894- 1896, Mahler of 1895- 1896, and Darius of 1898) expressed Nietzsche's Zarathustra almost at the same time.
1966, tuchman's brilliant and fascinating book The Tower of Pride came out. In the book, Strauss is portrayed as Caesar in the music world, and romain rolland's description of "the spread of Neroni" in Europe at the beginning of this century is used as evidence of her theory. She called Strauss "a faithful believer in Superman theory". Historians are accustomed to regard artists as symbols of the spirit of the times, but they often only see superficial phenomena and do not touch deeper connotations. To equate Strauss with William's militaristic spirit is to mislead people to equate elgar with Britain's power diplomacy. Miss tuchman couldn't come up with any hard written materials to support her assertion. Strauss worships Nietzsche's literary expression, not his philosophy. 1946 He wrote that he obtained "aesthetic enjoyment" from Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Fifty years ago, when he premiered his works in Berlin, he made it clear that he did not intend to "write philosophical music" ... I just wanted to use music to illustrate that human beings evolved from primitive people through various stages of religious and scientific development until Nietzsche's superman thought came into being. I want to express my respect for Nietzsche's thought with the whole symphony. "
Strauss's Zarathustra has no plot, nor does it depict specific events as vividly as Emile's pranks. This is a phonological poem about abstract thoughts, but on the basis of changing and opposing two tonality (B stands for human beings and C stands for nature), Strauss gives this phonological poem a dramatic conflict with music. He chose the titles of eight chapters in Nietzsche's works as a hint for music insertion, but still described the whole work as "freely adapted from Nietzsche's works", which made him break away from the way of expressing literary works with music that he could recognize at a glance. The outline of the work is Nietzsche's, but the content and details belong to Strauss style. The closest musical expression to Nietzsche's works is Darius's Mass of Life. Darius thought Strauss's Zarathustra was a failure. From his standpoint, this work is undoubtedly unsuccessful; However, Strauss's keen creativity, skillful composition skills, frugality of organizational structure and uniqueness of harmony color endow this work with strength and beauty, which has been replaced by Nietzsche since its publication. Strauss himself realized this. After the last rehearsal in Foucault, France, he wrote to his wife and said, "Among all my most important works, it is the most dazzling, the most perfect in form, the most abundant in content, and the most unique in timbre ... climax after climax, wonderful constantly! ! The score is impeccable ... "It sounds smug, but it was written at that time. This may be the excited reaction of a professional conductor, not the composer's complacency.
1February 894, Strauss first came up with the idea of using the music score of Zarathustra in Weimar. A diary dated1July 9, 895 shows that he is pregnant with Zarathustra. He wrote: "conceive a new musical poem: meditation, spiritual feeling, cognition, worship, doubt and disappointment." 1895 65438+started to create seriously on February 7th, and completed the reduced spectrum on July189617th. The big score was completed from February 4th to August 24th. 1896. In the extremely touching and magnificent Sunrise Overture (Strauss described the overture like this: "When the sun rises, people enter the world, or the world melts into people's hearts." The following action titles are: Hermit, Extreme Desire, Joy and Enthusiasm, Song of Death, Science, Rehabilitation, Song of Dance and Song of Nightcrawler. The orchestra consists of four wind instruments, woodwind instruments, six French horns, four trumpets, three trombones, two tubas, two harps and an organ. The score is surprisingly clear and easy to understand. Strauss, who can also play musical instruments, has achieved better results than complicating the texture (Mahler is like this).
The melody poem begins with the organ extending the deep C sound by four bars, which leads to the natural motivation. Four trumpets played C-G-C, followed by dramatic alternation of major and minor, and the timpani played a thunderous triplet. Stanles Ktlbrick has a unique vision. He used this gripping passage in the film "A Space Odyssey in 200 1 year" filmed in 1968, which reached its climax when the organ played the last note, and people appeared in B minor.
Strings use vibrato to express some ominous exploration. Living in Seclusion is obviously exploring religion, because after the score 16, the weak horn plays the theme of plainsong's creed, which is obviously ironic. Then it is blended with Strauss's gorgeous orchestral melody, accompanied by a soft organ, and the strings are divided into sixteen parts. Here, we see Strauss's unique style: a big tone change through the way of "lateral movement" of harmony. The British sound style and solo viola lead to "extreme desire", and the B sound returns as the main melody, which is quickly compared with the C major with natural motivation in the sentence by polytonality. When this work came out, it caused an uproar. This time, the organ performance of Ode to Our Lady of plainsong expressed religion, but it was picked out by the theme of bass string, thus beginning the section of "Joy and Enthusiasm".
The trombone introduces a new theme, which greatly reduces the enthusiasm of this passage: 1898. With the consent of Strauss, Scheedel wrote an article to analyze this tonal poem and named it "Disgust"-Zarathustra's protest against indulgence. Newman scoffed at the idea that music can express hatred. But from the relationship between this theme and the rigorous music structure of B and C, we can see that this theme can express hatred. The tonality in B minor gives the texture of Song of Death a soft tone and is hidden in mystery. Here, the spectrum example 16 tries to restore its supreme position again. Natural motivation returns in the brilliant climax of trumpet solo, and then the light is covered by darkness. Strauss's erudite fugue theme, which is motivated by "nature and man", shows his understanding of "science" and composes three rhythms and five different tonalities with all twelve notes of chromatic scale. However, he didn't let this melancholy tone last long. Spectrum example 16 cheer up and enter the "rehabilitation" scherzo. Despite several efforts to reiterate the seriousness of science, however, in the flood of human spirit, it did not have such an opportunity, and finally became a "prank" for clarinet playing in E flat major. A series of vibrato and trumpets repeat the natural motives, presenting a noisy scene, turning the music to the edge of "dance music" in C major, which is Superman dancing.
Strauss played the Vienna Waltz for the first time with melodious violin solo and humorous oboe in the key movement Song of Dance. This is irrefutable evidence that Strauss didn't let tuchman catch anything to attack him for agreeing with Superman's philosophy. Can you imagine Superman waltzing on the dance floor? The combination of irrelevant things is very convincing and shows the exaggerated humor of Bavarians. By the way, the theme of waltz is another seamless combination of natural and human themes. The first three notes of the oboe theme are natural motives, and the other four notes belong to the score16;
The charming score composed of seventeen strings and two harps finally gave way to the return of Dionysian hymn dance music, and then an extraordinary development department appeared, in which the two relative tonalities of natural motivation and human theme (score example 16) were repeatedly replaced with each other and gradually warmed up with the rhythm of dance music. Although the motive of "disgust" (score 65438+) an impassioned score 16 brought the dance music to the climax of natural motivation in C major, where it merged with the score 66, when the midnight bell of Song of Nightcrawler struck, the score of 17 dominated the whole song. In his poems, Zarathustra expresses the joy of overcoming disasters with a strange and complicated psychology of awe and ecstasy. In music poetry, the roar of bells slowly overwhelmed the expressive force of music example 17. Tonality also slipped from a strong C key to a soft serenade in B major. The theme of people (score 16) is played as counterpoint melody. The motive of "disgust" was inserted for the last time, but the weak ending harmony erased all traces of conflict, and the conflict became a distant memory. What we can hear is the unresolved basic conflict between man and nature, B and C, the natural theme of trombone and bass playing C, alternating with the high chords of distant woodwind instruments in B major, but the music we finally heard is the natural theme of cello plucking and bass.
People's understanding of the plot increases their appreciation of the music in Chaudhry's Pranks and Don Quixote, while people don't even need to remember the title when listening to Zarathustra. It is no accident that Zarathustra is favored by people. Before 200 1 space roaming, Zarathustra became famous. The difficulty of this work can't scare the current professional orchestras and conductors. They like challenges and scoring. I don't think the audience understands or cares who Nietzsche and Zarathustra are. What they hear is rich, exciting and innovative music. The melody is humorous, powerful, touching and full of vitality. For them, this work is "what Richard Strauss said".