he Sunrise from Richard Strauss’s : the most famous yet arguably the most deceptive opening to a piece of orchestral music of all time, proving that just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, neither can you judge a tone poem by how it starts. But what an for the whole orchestra. It’s no surprise that Stanley Kubrick uses this apocalyptic darkness-to-supernova fanfare as an emblem of the unknowable cosmos in his film , because that’s exactly what Strauss intended it to mean when he wrote it in 1896.
