Zarathustra

Even Friedrich Nietzsche was not sure how his great hymn Also Sprach Zarathustra should or would be classified. He perhaps thought it would be best to call the work a symphony. Richard Strauss took this suggestion literally and wrote a massive symphonic poem in four sections that defies all attempts at classification. When, in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001 – A Space Odyssey , a monkey strikes a bovine skeleton with a bone to the sounds of the openi...