Janine Jansen plays Beethoven & Zarathustra speaks

Philosophy and music: Nietzsche meets Strauss. Human and super-human, so to speak; Nietzsche dreams himself into a longed-for philosophical reality, while Strauss responds to this musically with a very Bavarian vitality and the healthiest of disposi-tions. “Music has been dreaming for too long,” said Strauss, “now we want to wake up. We have been sleepwalkers, we should be daydreamers.” This premise gave rise to one of his greatest works. The opening bars of this immense work were made world-famous by Stanley Kubrick’s film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. You absolutely have to hear it live. Elvis Presley was also aware of the triumphal effect of this open-ing; he used it as a triumphant introduction to every concert in his later career, from 1971 right up to his last concert in June 1977. As a kind of prelude to this, we play the prelude to Schreker’s opera ‘Die Gezeichneten’ (‘The Stigmatised’ or ‘The Brand-ed’), written a good twenty years later: music for the end of an era, so to speak, ex-tremely delicate and refined, a final flourishing of European Romanticism. Janine Jansen then takes us right back to the very beginnings of this Romanticism, to the Viennese Classical era, with Beethoven’s immortal violin concerto.

The opening bars of Richard Strauss’s ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ were made world-famous by Stanley Kubrik’s cult film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ – you absolutely have to hear it live!