Incidentally, Clayderman, 'The Prince of Romance', is evidently still at large and was seen lurking around the National Concert Hall on Wednesday night last. All that twinkly, easy-listening, elevator music must keep the constitution in good stead.

Thankfully, the theme from Space Odyssey 2001 is still positively 'cool'. Kubrick's film has immortalized it and various remixes and spin-offs, defamed it.

In its original context, however, as the first movement of the Nietzsche-inspired tone poem, Also sprach Zarathustra and in the context of the life-story of its composer, Richard Strauss, that snippet of powerful music represents a lot more than anything which is considered to be cool.

Richard Strauss was not the greatest composer of all time, a fact to which he readily admitted . . .

"I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer." How admirable of the man, that in a world of Stravinskys, Wagners and Schoenbergs, each of whom deemed himself the true high priest of 20th-century music, he could acknowledge his own shortcomings. Several biographies of Strauss suggest that his head was so saturated with the intellectual ideologies of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and the composer Alexander Ritter, who urged Strauss to write in the tone poem genre, that, too concerned with the representation of 'abstract' inspiration, he never actually forged his own identity in his work.

But, is there not a most poignant identity evident in Strauss's output all the same? Apolitical though he is maintained by some to have been, there is a tenuous socio-political thread to be found in his works, to which his steadfast atheism adheres suitably. In works such as Don Juan, Don Quixote, Till Eulenspeigel and Also sprach Zarathustra, the explicit strident heroism meets a dark end and dwindles into silence or anarchic confusion. Nietzsche's 'ubermensch' (superman) represented more to Strauss than the Aryan supremacy with which the figure became entangled, namely the possibility of greatness in any human being but this greatness is often marked by decay and failure in his works.

Noted for the scorn with which he looked upon his contemporary concert-going public, Strauss most certainly seems to have enjoyed toying with or mocking the tastes of his audience. He insisted upon the importance of having at least one tuneful, kitsch moment in every piece to please the 'dumbest' audience member but, particularly in his opera writing, he often employed the most seemingly gratuitous discordant, deliberately ugly writing, enough to ruffle more than a few feathers.

Regardless of the 'how' or 'why', Strauss, though he composed right up until the end of his life in 1949, was left behind in the wake of the Schoenberg movement at the turn of the century. Today, his music enjoys sufficient popularity in symphony halls, much because his orchestration is terrifically exciting both to perform and to listen to. The lack of spirituality or personality in his music is often cited as a reason for disliking Strauss, something for which the same people adore Mahler.

Strauss, the anarchic atheist, is and very much desired to be, an anti-Mahler. It might seem that Strauss's music does not know itself harmonically or structurally, swaying drunkenly from chord to chord, atonality to tonality as it pleases but we can underestimate how deliberately this cacophony was decided upon. I am convinced that a musical revolution simmered in the back of Strauss's mind. We will never know why that revolution never took shape.