Power in Music
STRAUSS'S "Egyptian March" is a singularly complete instance of the Nietzschean romanticism of late 19th Century Germany. It is a deliberate attempt to create in musical terms the picture of an. empire entirely outside the tradition and experience of . European civilisation-epormous, cruel, glittering, perfect in its heavy chariots, high helmets, and giant spears, gladiatorial in its disciplined inhumanity, the army of a stone frieze; moving according to rhythms, actuated by beliefs and visions quite unlike ours, but fanatic in its triumph and proclamation of
power, an echo from an early chapter of Spengler. The fact that Nietzsche and the rest did no more than project their own unappealing ideas on civilisations too newly discovered and too remote to object, that dynastic Egypt no more corresponded to the ideal of highly develoyed barbarism than most other societies, does not detract from the spectacular qualities of this music-those wordless voices calling rhythmically on the general presiding over the holocaust, er on some Ozymandias of an idol, are
the voices of men as inhuman as ants; but for all that the vision is romantic and melodramatic and already it requires a little information to understand it.
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19461101.2.20.1.5
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 384, 1 November 1946, Page 10
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196Power in Music New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 384, 1 November 1946, Page 10
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