Also Sprach Houston

Mission Control in Houston chose to awake the Apollo 15 astronauts from one of their sleep periods with an interesting choice of tunes: the grandiose opening strains of Richard Strauss's symphonic poem Also Sprach Zarathustra. Evocative of spectacular sunrises and other occurrences that call for a 107-piece orchestral accompaniment, the splendid fanfare was also used in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, which probably accounts for Houston's playing it.

Actually, when Strauss wrote the music, he was thinking of Nietzsche's treatise in which the philosopher poured out his prophecies of Superman through the voice of the Persian Zarathustra, the founder of Zoroastrianism. "I teach you the Superman," wrote Nietzsche.

"Man is something that shall be overcome . . . Man is a rope tied between beast and Superman--a rope over an abyss . . . The Superman is the meaning of the earth." NASA's public relations office, of course, makes no such Nietzschean claims about the astronauts. In fact, Strauss himself would shudder if he knew that apart from 2001, most astronauts and other Americans hearing the music would associate it with a series of decidedly mundane TV commercials.

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