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Carl Orff also composed a three-movement setting of part of Nietzsche's text as a teenager, but this work remains unpublished.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
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“Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if we are led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, “You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn’t it lovely?””
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