Musical and Literary Adaptations
The book inspired Richard Strauss to compose the tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, which he designated "freely based on Friedrich Nietzsche."
Zarathustra's roundelay is set as part of Gustav Mahler's Third Symphony (1895-6), originally under the title What Man Tells Me, or alternatively What the Night tells me (of Man).
Frederick Delius based his major choral-orchestral work A Mass of Life (1904-5) on texts from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The work ends with a setting of Zarathustra's roundelay which Delius had composed earlier, in 1898, as a separate work.
Carl Orff also composed a three-movement setting of part of Nietzsche's text as a teenager, but this work remains unpublished.
Latin American writer Giannina Braschi wrote the philosophical novel "United States of Banana" based on Walter Kaufman's translation of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra"; in it, Zarathustra and Hamlet philosophize about the liberty of modern man in a capitalist society." Italian progressive rock Museo Rosenbach released in 1973 the album "Zarathustra", with lyrics referring to the book.
Read more about this topic: Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Famous quotes containing the words musical and/or literary:
“Fifty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.”
—Anonymous. Popular saying.
Dating from World War I—when it was used by U.S. soldiers—or before, the saying was associated with nightclub hostess Texas Quinan in the 1920s. It was the title of a song recorded by Sophie Tucker in 1927, and of a Cole Porter musical in 1929.
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)