Word: zarathustra
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...early youth, precocious, Munich-born Richard Strauss had written under the influence of Mozart and Brahms. But after about 1885, Strauss's contemporaries called his work "psychopathic music." They railed against the brazen dissonances in his huge, Wagnerian tone poems (Don Quixote, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration, etc.), the savage horrors of his operas Salome and Elektra, his general lack of taste in composition. But no one could overlook his genius: his unique gifts as an orchestrator, his penetrating power for illuminating character and for describing anything from the zany antics of Don Quixote to the bestiality...
Strauss: Thus Spake Zarathustra (Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Artur Rodzinski conducting; Victor, 9 sides). Though Zarathustra hasn't much to say, Conductor Rodzinski doesn't miss a word. Recording: good...
...once it is achieved, orthodox Christianity will be as old-fashioned as "parish-pump politics." Our descendants, as well as the descendants of our Oriental contemporaries, will be heirs to a religion and a civilization distilled from the teachings of many spiritual messiahs, including Confucius, Socrates, Christ, Buddha, Zarathustra and Mohamed...
...even more so. The Third Brandenburg Concerto in G Major is a tried and trusted quantity, although one might have wished for a few less strings than the Boston Symphony can throw into the fray at any time. Previously this year, more than competent performances of Thus Spake Zarathustra and Don Quixote were heard, but the Don Juan which followed can be spoken of only in glowing superlatives. Also heard during this hour and a half of musical ecstasy was an-almost-equal-to-Toscanini Brahms' Variations on a theme of Haydn, and three choral selections sung by the Cocilia...
...World War I the British and American propagandists made much of Nietzsche's wicked writings "The Antichrist," "Beyond Good and Evil", and "Thus Spake Zarathustra"--to prove that the Kaiser and his clique (none of them had probably ever read or even heard of the books) were leagued with the devil. Today the German rulers not only read but preach from Nietzschean texts. By careful excision the official Nazi philosophers have adapted Nietzche's works to buttress and lend a respectable philosophical aura to their case. Friedrich Nietzsche who despised his contemporary Germans, who was bitterly anti-anti-semitic...