"I want to make music that people remember - not because I had such fast fingers, but because it was so touching," says Claire Huangci about her music-making. The internationally acclaimed pianist will perform Johannes Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto together with Mario Hartmuth and the Kassel State Orchestra.
There is hardly a more famous beginning to a piece of music than the introduction to Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss. With his tone poem, the Munich composer, who was just 30 years old, broke away from the form of the brief symphonic poem derived from the overture for the first time and based his large-scale work more on Franz Liszt's Faust Symphony. The tone poem is based on Friedrich Nietzsche's book about the hermit who descends from a mountain to the people and proclaims his teachings. Richard Strauss was an avid reader of Nietzsche, a brother in spirit so to speak, and studied the writings of the philosopher, who was born in 1844, intensively. It was Nietzsche himself who called Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra a symphony rather than a tone poem.
July 13, 2024
