Dancing gods: Nietzsche and Strauss

Na Sung-in

The author is a music critic and director of the classical music brand Poongwoldang. 

Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed the arrival of a new age through the voice of the poet-prophet Zarathustra. God is dead. Humanity is a bridge, not a destination. The age of gods, heroes and exalted men — of fixed and absolute authority — gives way to the age of the Übermensch, the individual who continually transcends oneself. Above all, this higher human being learns to dance. “I would believe only in a god who could dance,” Nietzsche famously wrote. Here, dance is the emblem of freedom. It symbolizes a life unbound, a refusal to remain fixed and the joyous ability to overcome the “spirit of gravity” through play and laughter.

To dance is to resist settling comfortably in one place. It is to move swiftly or slowly, to alternate freely between motion and stillness and through those gestures to liberate the spirit. It is no surprise, then, that when Richard Strauss composed his tone poem “Also sprach Zarathustra” (“Thus Spoke Zarathustra”) in 1896, inspired by Nietzsche’s masterpiece of the same title, dance became one of his most eloquent musical expressions of humanity. While the majestic depiction of sunrise remains the work’s most celebrated passage, the “Dance Song,” refusing to submit to a rigid tempo, reveals the vitality of the playful human body and the restless energy of life itself.

Guided by Nietzsche’s philosophy, Strauss sought to ascend beyond his own artistic limits. He wished to break free from the musical conservatism of his native Munich. Even as he inherited the legacies of Franz Liszt, the trailblazing innovator, and Richard Wagner, the towering giant of German music, he was determined to move beyond them. He pursued a universal European spirit rather than Liszt’s dazzling virtuosity or nationalist tendencies. Likewise, he sought to transcend Wagner’s preoccupation with myth, redemption, sacrifice and heroism, instead portraying the doubts of the modern individual, the pleasures of the senses and the enduring tension — and coexistence — between humanity and nature.

Nietzsche observed that the devil is solemn, burdening humanity with the oppressive weight of obligation. He imagined an individual who says “I will,” rather than one constrained by endless “I must” imposed by society, tradition and convention. He envisioned people who dare, who play and who continually surpass themselves. That vision ignited the imagination of the young Strauss.

We, too, should learn to dance in Nietzsche’s sense of the word. We should strive, again and again, to transcend ourselves.