Gates between worlds

From the 2001: A Space Odyssey fanfare through portmanteaus Richard Strauss, Stanley Kubrick,
and ourselves.

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‍Rob James ‍

Lovers of God, sometimes a door opens, and a human being becomes a way for grace to come through.
—Rumi (1207-1283)

‍July 3, 2026

Was Richard Strauss the last of the 19th century music fuddy-duddies (Alpine Symphony, Metamorphoses, Four Last Songs) or the first of the modernes (Salome, Elektra)? Was Stanley Kubrick in the cinematic rear guard (Paths of Glory, Spartacus, Barry Lyndon, Full Metal Jacket) or the avant-garde (Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, 2001, The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut)?

Wait, is this a midterm, answer A or B? Can I pick C (both A and B) or D (neither A nor B)? I actually prefer E (both C and D), but know from my long-ago SAT and LSAT days not to choose that one.

I am of an old generation and a new one too. I was in the final partner class of the law firm of Pillsbury, Madison & Sutro with that comma and no LLP in sight; one of the youngest real users of a slide rule; a student in the last Stanford intro computer science course quarter to run punch cards; the last Semaphore instructor at my local Boy Scout camp; and for all I know the last Robert Benchley aficionado. On the other hand, I was an early adopter of the Macintosh personal computer and IX Netcom World Wide Web (so spelled out), and a fan of Twin Peaks, Max Headroom and Windham Hill Records before any of them became cool in most of my circles. (I also relished the local-PBS-produced (!) drama Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, which no one outside of MST3K remembers (rest in peace Raul Julia).)

Everyone casts oneself as the star of one's own biopic. The rest of us in your life are lucky to be supporting cast, otherwise sweaty faceless background extras. So it is natural to perceive oneself as a portmanteau—originally a piece of luggage that unsnaps from either side, then a Lewis Carroll coinage out of multiple words (“slithy,” “chortle”), and here a gate that opens in fundamentally divergent ways—in Twin Peaks, “between two worlds.”

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In honor of Father's Day when I started this piece, let me crack open the first gate with my dad, Gad Llewellyn James (1914-1992), who among other gifts graced me with his love of music. It was a narrow and peculiar love, mind you. It did not extend to the great Baroque or Classical Period works of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and their ilk. He did not care for operas or what he called small-scale “chamber-pot music.” For whatever reason this Depression Era Iowa farm boy and World War II Marine was fond of light orchestral works.

Dad bought some of the first stereophonic long playing vinyl albums (he still had some 78s and monos). Schubert's Symphony No. 8 (“Unfinished,” shy a couple of movements) fit comfortably on a miniature LP (an EP avant le lettre!). He liked Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. (I never even heard of “Rach Three” until the 1996 movie Shine.) Other than that it was mainly showtunes from My Fair Lady and especially the mysterious Carousel. To this day when I hear the beautiful “If I Loved You,” its strangely subjunctive mood brings my mind and heart back to my father.

All that being said, pride of place in Dad’s collection were the works of Richard Strauss (1864-1949). Born into a musical Munich family, Strauss was an assistant conductor to Hans von Bülow, the long-suffering cuckold and worshipful disciple of Richard Wagner. Von Bülow said that Strauss had the talent to be “Richard III.” Not “Richard II,” because there could not be an immediate successor to the Terror of Bayreuth. (Sure enough, decades elapsed between Wagner’s last work Parsifal (1883) and the next serious German opera, Strauss’s 1906 Salome.)   

Strauss overcame his Wagnerian anxieties of influence (cf. Harold Bloom) with a decade (1889-1899) of mini-symphonies that he called “tone poems.” The first of these was my father's favorite, Don Juan. What's not to like? A thrilling theme, and only 18 minutes long. (Strauss was always a hurry-up conductor, once finishing the Beethoven Ninth (usually 74 minutes, which drove the length of the first compact discs) in only 45 minutes, as if he were rushing to catch a train.)

The Don Juan of legend was a cad, who enticed genteel ladies ruining their prospects of suitable marriage. Strauss's Don Juan nobly searches for an ideal woman, and when his quest fails he is transfigured. (Transfiguration shows up a lot in German works, from Goethe’s Faust to Wagner's heroines to Strauss's somber Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration).)

Another favorite of my father's was Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche (Merry Pranks). It is a picaresque tale of a mischief-maker upsetting apple-carts in marketplaces. He meets a sad end as a hangman’s justice is served on him, his plaintive theme echoing one more time. In Don Juan (and the similar Don Quixote) I hear Indiana Jones and other programmatic themes; in the quirky-perky Till Eulenspiegel I hear the Tom and Jerry cartoon music.

Strauss even cast himself in his own biopic, A Hero’s Life (Ein Heldenleben). He portrays his critics with a leitmotif of four chiding chords. It reminds me of the whomp whomp trombone accompanying SNL Rachel Dratch’s Debbie Downer. He even quotes his own prior tunes, like The Beatles singing “she loves you, yeah yeah yeah” inside “All You Need is Love.”

My personal favorite of my dad’s LPs, and the obvious basis for this mixtape article, is Thus Spake Zarathustra (Also Sprach Zarathustra). I am proud to say I encountered it BEFORE the opening “Daybreak” (Einleitung) fanfare was used in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (or Deodato's rock version). I knew nothing of Friedrich Nietzsche at the time, and since I’ve covered him elsewhere will leave him alone here. (I will say that old Freddie is a portmanteau himself, the last of the nineteenth-century professorial responders to Immanuel Kant, and maybe an early existentialist and Freud precursor.)

The fanfare is only ninety seconds though, the first of nine pieces. After that the key shifts and the work progresses through alternately sweetly pleasant and darkly brooding pieces, said to evoke events in the life of “Zarathustra.” (Nietzsche’s mouthpiece bears only a vague resemblance to the Zoroaster historical figure.) I still remember having to physically turn the LP over between pieces 1 through 6 on “side A” and pieces 7 through 9 on “side B”!

My favorite is the sixth piece, “On Learning” (Von der Wissenschaft). Its theme hits all twelve tones of the octave. You do not have to read music to visualize the scientist’s large bony left hand spanning those black and white piano keys:

‍It becomes a fugue as theme overlays theme overlays theme. A gate perhaps to Edward O. Wilson’s consilience of sciences? Natural selection meets genetics to produce neo-Darwinism, and then they all meet epigenetics and CRISPR?

The ninth piece appears to end in a soothing B major chord. But a bass C, one half-step higher, reopens a troubled gate. Zarathustra has returned to his mountain, leaving the living of our lives up to us. We must love our fate (amor fati).

In the 1900s, Strauss reached peak avant-garde. He was playing with fire by taking the scandalous Oscar Wilde play Salomé and producing a second scandal, the (unaccented) Salome—a sumptuous, carnal, exotic-erotic opera. The term is now ruled out of bounds in polite circles, but by the standards of its time this piece is “Orientalism” run rampant. Sinuous and serpentine themes writhe over chords a half-step apart. Dainty princess-feet skim over the stone tiles of the palace courtyard, while seven veils are seductively shed one by one until nothing (much) is left to the imagination. When Salome asks as her dance-prize for the head of John the Baptist, Herod commands, “Kill that woman!” (“Man töte dieses Weib!”) A shocking chord accompanies the soldiers crushing her underneath their shields.

The reviews were merciless. The New York Sun said, “The whole story wallows in lust, lewdness, bestial appetites, and abnormal carnality.” That ultimate cacophony (“the most sickening chord in all opera”) has been said to have ended nineteenth-century music much as T. S. Eliot thought James Joyce’s Ulysses single-handedly killed the nineteenth century.

The next opera, Elektra, was more of the same. By the end of the grisly Greek drama there are dozens of blood-soaked bodies offstage. It is discordant from one end to the other, sung virtually nonstop by three females (Strauss loved the soprano voice). I dunno, these Salome and Elektra chords don’t seem very transgressive to me, after listening to over a century of a- and dys-tonality.

The later Strauss was more conventional. Was that a retreat? Or, as Julliard emeritus professor John Muller has suggested, was it simply that tonality was where Strauss’s next subjects took him? Ariadne auf Naxos turns out to be a mashup between low and high art; I saw Capriccio in person at the San Francisco Opera in the days before supertitles; meh.

Here is an awkward question. Can an artist live too long? Strauss was hot stuff in his youth—see Barbara Tuchman’s The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914. He was still active in the 1930s and 1940s, remaining in Germany and conducting at official Nazi events. Some say he stayed to protect Jewish family members and other friends, and he did write a piece urging tolerance. But many saw him as an appeaser, a collaborator, an accommodator. Arturo Toscanini said, “To Strauss the composer I take off my hat; to Strauss the man I put it back on again.” The conventional Metamorphoses and the haunting and gorgeous Four Last Songs were published postwar, bookending his 1949 death.

Leaving Strauss the man to the side, I close with a 1911 piece, my adult favorite, the finale to his post-Elektra opera Der Rosenkavalier. This features not one, not two, but three sopranos, with the mezzo playing a “trouser role,” the youth Octavian (some women have sung all three parts across their careers as their voices changed). The world-wise Field Marshal's wife (die Marschallin; the Germans have a single word for everything!) had taken “him” for a lover, but is now letting “him” go to enter holy matrimony with the innocent maiden Sophie. The trio is absolute perfection. It is a gate to another world. I am transfigured just listening.  Video of Trio performed by Stars of Tomorrow

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Now over to Stanley Kubrick (1928-1999). My good friend and best man John Morris referred me to Kubrick’s initial gig as a still photographer for Look magazine. Judging from his output, I think that experience was formative for his cinematography. His early work The Killing starring Sterling Hayden was a fine movie, leading Kirk Douglas to champion him for the World War I drama Paths of Glory. (I still had trouble seeing Douglas, the lead character of Kubrick’s Spartacus, as a French officer.)

Lolita deserves another blog post. I will cover it and Nabokov separately. The others too! Rarely has a director achieved such an unbroken lineage of genius: Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket, The Shining, Eyes Wide Shut. Yes, even the 1968 Playboy interview, straight words no centerfold no chaser. It’s like Michelangelo, or Fawlty Towers, or 1961-1966 Sandy Koufax.

Barry Lyndon is one of the most visually beautiful movies I have ever seen. Kubrick developed special lighting, one of his many cinematic innovations, bestowing upon Marisa Berenson and Ryan O’Neal a roseate glow. It is ponderously slow-moving, though. My friends chuckled when I confessed that I watched it again at 2.0x speed with English subtitles. I don’t care--that worked better for today's attention span.

2001: A Space Odyssey began as a horse-opera, code-named ”Journey Beyond the Stars” (wut?). A massive Napoleon epic had been nixed and Kubrick was hunting big game. Thank goodness he found Arthur C. Clarke and ”The Sentinel,” leading to this immortal meditation on human and non-human intelligence. The “Dawn of Man” sequence could not have been better captured than by Strauss’s fanfare. It and the other classical music excerpts (from Johann Strauss, Aram Khachaturian and Györgi Ligeti) were originally fillers waiting for Alex North’s score. North was shocked when he watched the movie and realized his music had been canned!

Clarke kept a diary of the years of their exasperating partnership. I love the entry “July 12, 1964. Now have everything—except the plot.” The Jerome B. Agel book The Making of Kubrick’s 2001 was my constant boyhood companion. Clarke’s novelization of 2001, and the 2010 sequel (book and movie; I never read 2061 or 3001), do not work as well for me; they tell too much.

The result is one of the greatest works of spirituality in art. The special effects are no less stunning. Movies only a few years old with flip-phones already look dated, but these 1968 sets are timeless.

“Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite” truly opens a gate between worlds. Kubrick's colorless monolith is more iconic than Clarke’s original pyramid. The encounters with a superior intelligence are as plausible as anything cooked up by Carl Sagan (Contact), Christopher Nolan and Kip Thorne (Interstellar), or Steven Spielberg (Disclosure Day).  Other thresholds have been crossed in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, Robert Silverberg’s The Gate of Worlds, Robert A. Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky, Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and countless films and TV shows.

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Richard Strauss is a gate between the old (Brahms, Wagner) and the new (the concert hall’s Stravinsky and Schoenberg, but also the movies’ Erich Korngold and John Williams). Stanley Kubrick is a gate between the old (John Ford, David Lean) and the new (Terrence Malick, David Lynch).

Every exit is an entrance somewhere else.—Tom Stoppard, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard himself being perhaps a gate)

Gentle Reader, in your own movie of your own life, are you the Last of your Particular Mohicans, or are you your Bran the Broken, First of His Name?

In either case (or, better, both cases), may Ineffable Providence grace you with a biopic co-star. Equal billing, same size trailer, same fruit basket, same number of profit points.