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Real Audio - Don Quixote
Just as Cervante's Don Quixote made fun of the pretenses of the knightly romance, so Strauss goes overboard in his depictions of scenes from the novel. Set as a series of variations ("ad absurdum," he was later to say), Strauss tells this story of the idealistic Don Quixote and his doomed quests. In this variation, Quixote comes upon a herd of sheep. Thinking them to be an enemy army, he scatters them, riding off in triumph. Here, Strauss abandons any pretense of musical pictorialism, and turns the orchestra's winds into flutter-tonguing noise-makers to depict the sheep.
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Real Audio - Also Sprach Zarathustra
The romantic symphonic poem often told stories (Strauss's Don Quixote is an example), but could also illustrate philosophical or religious ideas. Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra) was based on a book by the same name by Friedrich Nietzsche. Strauss wrote that his intent in this piece was "to convey in music the idea of the development of mankind . . . culminating in Nietzsche's concept of the superman." He begins the work with a depiction of Zarathustra's address to the rising sun (the text of which he provides as a preface to the work). The powerful opening illustrates this well, and it is not surprising that Stanley Kubrick would choose this to illustrate "The Dawn of Man" in his 2001—A Space Odyssey.
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