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imitators, the focus of a whole literature of adulation and attack. Because of his abuse of the Germans as vulgar, materialist and philistine, he was particularly welcomed in France, but this did not prevent his becoming a cult in his native land. The sap was rising in Germany and Germans responded eagerly to Nietzsche’s theory of the rights of the strong over the weak. In his writings these were hedged about with a vast body of poetic suggestion and exploration, but taken crudely as positive precepts they became to his countrymen both directive and justification. By 1897 the “Nietzsche Cult” was an accepted phrase. In a bedroom in Weimar a man leaning against a pillow, staring at an alien world out of sad lost eyes, had bewitched his age.

To the “artist-geniuses” of real life Zarathustra was irresistible. In Paris when a friend read passages of it to the peasant-born sculptor Rodin, one of the great movers of art forms of his time, he became so interested that he returned every evening until the whole book had been read aloud. At the end, after a long silence, he said, “What a subject to put into bronze!” Under the same thrall Strauss saw the subject in music and in fact Nietzsche himself had written that the whole of Zarathustra “might be considered as music.” It was not Strauss’s intention to set Nietzsche’s text to music but, modestly, “to convey musically an idea of the development of the human race from its origin through the various phases of evolution, religious as well as scientific, up to Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch.” The whole was to be his “homage to the genius of Nietzsche.”

When it became known that Germany’s most advanced composer was at work on a tone poem inspired by Germany’s most advanced philosopher, admirers grew nervous and enemies sharpened their pens. The finished piece, composed over a period of seven months in 1896 and scored for thirty-one woodwinds and brasses, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, triangle, glockenspiel, two harps and organ beside the usual strings, took thirty-three minutes’ playing time, almost twice as long as Till, and was performed under the composer’s baton within three months of its completion. Trumpets sounded the opening, swelling into an immense orchestral paean by the whole ensemble which seemed to depict less the sunrise stated in the program notes than the creation of the world. Its magnificence was breathtaking. The end came with twelve strokes of a low bell gradually dying away to a pianissimo trembling of strings and winds and ending in the famous “enigma” of a B major chord in the treble register against a dark mysterious C in the bass. In between there was again the Strauss wizardry of polyphonic effect and enough musical ideas for a dozen pieces: “Science” was expressed by a fugue containing the twelve tones of the chromatic scale and the Dance theme of girls in a meadow, introduced by high flutes in a halting waltz rhythm, seemed to catch all the joy and freshness of a green world. It was, however, more Viennese than Bacchic and somehow cheapened by bells and triangles. Three days after the premiere Zarathustra was performed again in Berlin and within the year in all the major German cities as well as in Paris, Chicago and New York, evoking from critics new excesses of both savagery and eulogy. To Hanslick it was “tortured and repulsive,” to the American James Huneker “dangerously sublime,” to the eminent musicologist Richard Batka “a milestone in modern musical history” and Strauss “pre-eminently the composer of our time.”

In Germany because of the plethora of performances, with a festival every week and continuing operas, concerts, choral societies and chamber music, success was almost too easy; orchestras were ready to grasp a composition the instant it was finished. “There is too much music in Germany,” wrote Romain Rolland in italics. As an observer deeply interested both in music and in Germany, he explained: “This is not a paradox. There is no worse misfortune for art than a superabundance of it.” Germany, Rollańd thought (not without French bias),