s! Higher
still! And mind you don't forget your legs! I have canonised laughter.
You super-men, learn to laugh!"[175] And the dance dies away and is lost
in ethereal regions, and Zarathustra is lost to sight while dancing in
distant worlds. But if he has solved the riddle of the universe for
himself, he has not solved it for other men; and so, in contrast to the
confident knowledge which fills the music, we get the sad note of
interrogation at the end.

[Footnote 174: Composed in 1895-96, and performed for the first time at
Frankfort-On-Main in November, 1896.]

[Footnote 175: Nietzsche.]

There are few subjects that offer richer material for musical
expression. Strauss has treated it with power and dexterity; he has
preserved unity in this chaos of passions, by contrasting the
_Sehnsucht_ of man with the impassive strength of Nature. As for the
boldness of his conceptions, I need hardly remind those who heard the
poem at the Cirque d'ete of the intricate "Fugue of Knowledge," the
trills of the wood wind and the trumpets that voice Zarathustra's laugh,
the dance of the universe, and the audacity of the conclusion which, in
the key of B major, finishes up with a note of interrogation, in C
natural, repeated three times.

I am far from thinking that the symphony is without a fault. The themes
are of unequal value: some are quite commonplace; and, in a general way,
the working up of the composition is superior to its underlying
thought. I shall come back later on to certain faults in Strauss's
music; here I only want to consider the overflowing life and feverish
joy that set these worlds spinning.

_Zarathustra_ shows the progress of scornful individualism in
Strauss--"the spirit that hates the dogs of the populace and all that
abortive and gloomy breed; the spirit of wild laughter that dances like
a tempest as gaily on marshes and sadness as it does in fields."[176]
That spirit laughs at itself and at its idealism in the _Don Quixote_ of
1897, _fantastische Variationen uber ein Thema ritterlichen Charakters_
("Don Quixote, fantastic variations on a theme of knightly character"),
op. 35; and that symphony marks, I think, the extreme point to which
programme music may be carried. In no other work does Strauss give
better proof of his prodigious cleverness, intelligence, and wit; and I
say sincerely that there is not a work where so much force is expended
with so great a loss for the sake of a game and a musical joke w