Sound and Speech in Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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2022-02-15
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en
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Friederich Nietzsche’s masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A book for All and None (1883-1885) is a book that has greatly influenced Western culture, despite the difficulty that many readers face with interpreting it (Johnson 173). This book is unique in Nietzsche's oeuvre because he considered it as a musical work, claiming that the expression of the words of Zarathustra create a musical experience for the reader (Parkes 12). “Zarathustra was born completely from the spirit of music”, Gustave Mahler wrote in confirmation of the musicality of Nietzsche’s book (qtd. in Parkes 12). The book also inspired the composition of the tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss (Kristiansen 59) and the choral-orchestral work The Mass of Life by Frederick Delius (Hutchings 242). Despite the influence that the book has had on musicians and the recognition that it has received, there have been very few scholarly works that studied or briefly discussed the musicality of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. On account of this research gap, the following paper analyses how musicality is articulated as well as represented in Nietzsche's book, and what this reveals about Nietzsche’s understanding of the function of sound and music.
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Faculteit der Letteren