ABSTRACT
The Strauss's last tone poem should take an alpine mountain as its focus provides fitting closure to the era of the New German school of composition. The 1896 tone poem Also sprach Zaruthustra has always offered an explicit marker of Strauss's Nietzschean orientation, yet it is only in recent scholarship that the extent and depth of Strauss's engagement with Nietzschean ideas has been properly explored. As the last tone poem it reaffirms the anti-metaphysical project that drives this Straussian genre, even citing the project's Nietzschean kernel, the C-G-C nature motif from Also sprach Zarathustra. Strauss's earlier tone poems and operas had grappled with questions like Nietzschean individualism and the challenge of modernity in ways that implied some form of political engagement. Nietzschean sublime, would necessarily maintain sight of a horizonit would resist merely banishing what Lyotard calls nostalgia for a "missing contents" and would insist on the value of struggle with the real.
