Music History Monday: Richard Strauss, Stanley Kubrick, Friedrich Nietzsche, and “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”

On November 27, 1896 – 127 years ago today – Richard Strauss conducted the premiere performance of his sprawling orchestral tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra in the German city of Frankfurt. 

Requests

A momentary and applicable (if gratuitous) diversion. 

Over the course of the first half of my musical life I played a lot of gigs, both in bands and as a solo piano player.  The bands ranged from fairly high end to not fairly high end.  The best band I ever played with was led by the alto saxophonist Lee Konitz; the worst was a disco band the name of which will remain my little secret.  The first band in which I played was a rock ‘n’ roll garage band called “Cold Sun” and the last was a Berkeley, California-based Klezmer group called “Hot Borscht.” (“Cold Sun” and “Hot Borscht”: temperature challenged tags in both cases.)

As a solo player I’ve played pretty much every sort of gig, from cocktail parties, weddings, sing-a-longs, awards shows, and receptions to a long-running gig at a long defunct restaurant in Oakland, California, called The Pewter House.

I played at The Pewter House, in 1978 and 1979, on Friday and Saturday evenings.  It was most definitely during my “starving (grad) student” stage, so what I particularly loved about the job was the dinner I’d eat with the staff after closing time.  There was always left-over prime rib, and I consumed my body weight on a weekly basis.  I also loved the people I worked with and dined with after-hours: the bartender, a big, beautifully mustachioed Czech named Marin; the wait staff (particularly the cocktail waitresses; OMG: how I continue to adore cocktail waitresses!); and the kitchen staff (mostly illegals who worked like dogs at multiple jobs and sent whatever money they could back home); talk about a cross section of Oakland’s population. 

What I did not love about my job was an occupational hazard shared by all house musicians, and that is the request.  I’d prime my tip jar with a twenty and a couple of fives, but that wouldn’t stop folks from making requests and then winking at me as they dropped a dime or a quarter into the jar, as if they were doing me a favor.  As evenings wore on, and the restaurant’s action increasingly moved into the cocktail lounge (where the piano was located), the blood alcohol level of the clientele became markedly higher.  It was not at all uncommon, later in the evening, for me to be approached by an off-kilter patron who, in making their request, would say something on the lines of:

“hey, can you guys play . . .”

Yes, I was a solo act, but perhaps these inebriates were seeing double, thus the “you guys.”

Among the most common requests I received at The Pewter House there in the late 1970s were: “can you guys play The Sting?” (this meant Scott Joplin’s classic rag, The Entertainer, which dominated the soundtrack of the 1973 Paul Newman/Robert Redford movie The Sting). Just as often I was asked to play Love is Blue, Classical Gas, Brian’s Song, and . . . and . . . wait for it . . . “the theme from 2001.”

2001: A Space Odyssey, Produced, Directed, and Co-written by Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999)

By “the theme from 2001,” my requesters were referring to the opening minute-and-a-half of Richard Strauss’ orchestral tone poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  In Strauss’ work, this opening music is meant to represent sunrise and with it, the coming of the “light,” meaning the coming of enlightenment.  In his movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (of 1968), Kubrick uses Strauss’ music to represent exactly the same thing.  Strauss’ Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the sonic equivalent of the Monolith, together the bringers of knowledge, enlightenment, and transformation.…

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