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Carl Orff also composed a three-movement setting of part of Nietzsche's text as a teenager, but this work remains unpublished.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:
“I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bayed the bear
With hounds of Sparta: never did I hear
Such gallant chiding; for besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seemed all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I understood that all the material of a literary work was in my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)