The 2001 fanfare ends a Strauss tone poem that refuses to pick a key
Most people know only its first minute, the blazing sunrise Stanley Kubrick used in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Richard Strauss's 1896 tone poem runs about 33 minutes, draws on Nietzsche, and ends in deliberate limbo, with high instruments sounding B major while the basses pluck a C beneath them.
Strauss wrote Also sprach Zarathustra in 1896, taking his cue from Nietzsche's philosophical book of 1883 to 1885, and conducted the premiere in Frankfurt on 27 November that year. He split the work into nine sections, each named after a chapter of Nietzsche's text and played with only three clear breaks. The orchestra is enormous: six horns, two tubas, an organ, two harps, a bell tuned to low E and sixteen first violins.
The opening is built from physics. A low C rumbles in the double basses, contrabassoon and organ before the brass enters with a three-note idea, C, G, C, sometimes called the Nature motif. It follows the lowest notes of the natural overtone series until a major third flips to a minor one, the first note outside that series. Later, a fugue in the Science and Learning section uses all twelve notes of the chromatic scale, and one passage asks the basses for a contra B, playable only on a five-string instrument or with an extension.
Underneath lies a tug of war between B major, standing for humanity, and C major, standing for the universe. Although the two keys sit side by side, they share little: one carries five sharps, the other none. Neither wins. The finale opens with twelve strokes of midnight and closes unresolved, which commentators read as a riddle Strauss left unsolved.
Recordings tracked audio history. The first came in 1924, and Strauss himself made an experimental magnetic tape recording in Vienna in 1944. Fritz Reiner's 1954 Chicago version was the first in stereo. Kubrick's film used Herbert von Karajan's 1959 Vienna recording. Afterwards the fanfare went everywhere: Eumir Deodato's jazz-funk take won a 1974 Grammy, Elvis Presley walked on stage to it from 1971 to 1977, and Phish have played it 277 times.
Source: Also sprach Zarathustra
