Everything music from a perspective of a public
school music teacher with subject integration
(especially art, history, and literature) as a focus
to help teach the Common Core Curriculum.
Edvard Munch: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900 ), 1906
Introductory Speech: "Having attained the age of thirty, Zarathustra left his home and the lake of his home and went into the mountains. There he rejoiced in his spirit and his loneliness, and for ten years did not grow weary of it. But at last his heart turned one morning he got up with the dawn, stepped into the presence of the Sun and thus spake unto him: 'Thou great star! What would be thy happiness, were it not for those for whom thou shinest?"
Nietzsche's imagery of Zarathustra retreating into the wilderness may have been borrowed from "The Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. In it Plato says that an enlightened thinker is like a man who gradually struggles free of the chains of illusion in an underground cave and who learns by ascending to the world above and viewing things in the light of day, finally discovering the essence of truth by gazing at the sun itself (http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/hum_303/zarathustra.html)
The introduction to the story (symbolized by the dawning of a "Sunrise") is musically portrayed by the German composer Richard Strauss (1864-1949)
(called the Nature-motif in intervals of a fifth and octave, as C-G-C)] which leads to a great climax (the rising of the sun) for full orchestra and organ on the chord of C major.
This initial fanfare (also entitled "Sunrise") became particularly well known to the general public due to its use in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey,
I imagined what it might have looked like if I saw a sunrise for the first time in a long while and this picture came to mind (even though it is about a sunset):
Edvard Munch: Scream
Here are some other takes on "The Scream" that I found interesting and amusing:
because it was regarded as loose and ugly, 'exciting bad emotions.' Introduced to France and England in the early 17th centuries, this dance transformed into a more stately version in a slower triple time. Sarabandes became a standard movement of the suite form in the instrumental works by Henry Purcell, Sarabande from "Dioclesian" By Henry Purcell Dr. Ricardo Barros, Choreography