The tone poem as Nietzschean narrative

Given the frequency with which the label ‘narrator’ is applied to Strauss as tone poet, it is natural to wish to test the suitability of the concept of narration in relation to Also sprach Zarathustra. This immediately raises problems, since it is at best doubtful if music can be, as opposed to represent, a narrative. As Nattiez has observed, a symphonic poem cannot be translated into another medium, but ‘We can summarize or translate the narrative by which the composer was inspired.’ In the present context, narrative is to be understood as something which goes alongside the music, a meta-narrative, with three possibilities of reconstruction. The first is to take Strauss's section headings and compare them with the corresponding sections in Nietzsche. This is already tending towards musical analysis rather than criticism, since it may be that comparisons will reflect structural similarities rather than narrative equivalencies. As an alternative, it is possible to consider Strauss's headings and their place in Arthur Hahn's programme book, which is how the question of Zarathustra and narrative has usually been treated. The third possibility is to retain the headings only as vague outlines in an alternative narrative, hermeneutically derived from a wider consideration of issues in the work and in other pieces by Strauss and his contemporaries. Usually such activity in Strauss criticism has involved a strong biographical element in clear response to his later explicitly autobiographical works, Ein Heldenleben and Sinfonia Domestica.