The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  Late evening, after the social gathering, when the crowd had left, was his best time. Then he would stay behind alone in the salon or stealthily return to play music until well into the night. It turned out he had less reason to fear disturbing the peace than he had first thought, for he found that his ghostly music carried over only a limited range. The vibrations produced amazing effects near their source, but like all ghostly things, quickly languished with distance, grew feeble, their powers merely illusory. Within these four walls, Hans Castorp was alone with the wonders of his apparatus—with the lush achievements of this little truncated coffin of fiddlewood, this small, dull-black temple with its doors flung wide, before which he would sit in an armchair, hands folded, head on one shoulder, mouth open, letting the fullness of harmony spill over him.

  The singers he listened to, but could not see, had bodies that resided in America, in Milan, in Vienna, in Saint Petersburg—and they could reside where they liked, because what he had was the best part of them, the voice, and he valued this purified form, this abstraction that still remained physical enough to allow him real human control, and yet excluded all the disadvantages of too close personal contact, particularly if they happened to be fellow countrymen, Germans. It was possible to identify an artist’s nationality from pronunciation and dialect; the character of each voice said something about the individual’s spiritual growth, and the level of intelligence was apparent in the way the possibilities of the mind were used or neglected in achieving certain effects. Hans Castorp was annoyed if intelligence was lacking. And he also suffered, bit his lip in shame, from the imperfections in technical reproduction; he sat on hot coals whenever he played some familiar record he knew contained a shrill or squawking tone—which could easily happen, especially with tricky female voices. But that was part of the bargain—love must suffer. Sometimes he would bend down over the spinning, breathing machinery as if it were a bouquet of lilacs, his head in a cloud of fragrant sound; he would stand in front of the open cabinet and savor the autocratic bliss of the orchestra conductor, raising a hand to signal a trumpet for its timely entry. He had favorites in his cupboard, several pieces of vocal and instrumental music he never tired of hearing. We cannot refrain from listing them.

  One small group of records contained the closing scenes of a grandiose opera overflowing with melodic genius, written by one of Herr Settembrini’s compatriots, an old Southern master of musical drama, who had composed it in the second half of the previous century on commission from an Oriental prince, as part of solemn ceremonies at the dedication of a work of technology that would bring nations closer together. Hans Castorp was more or less familiar with the plot, knew the rough outline of the tragic fate of Radames, Amneris, and Aida, who sang to him from the cabinet—an incomparable tenor, a stately mezzo with that splendid break in the middle of her register, and a silvery soprano. It was all in Italian, but he understood more or less what they sang—not every word, but enough here and there, given his knowledge of the plot and his sympathy for its situations, a personal empathy that had increased each time he played the four or five records, until it now became a genuine infatuation.

  First came an argument between Radames and Amneris. The princess has him led before her in chains; she loves him and ardently longs to save him, even though he has cast aside his honor and his country for the sake of a barbarian slave girl—but to that accusation he replies, “In my thoughts my honor remained pure.” This integrity of his inner soul, despite feelings of guilt, is of little help to him, however, since his crimes are all too obvious; he is brought before a court of priests with no sympathies for anything human, and they will make short work of him if he does not change his mind at the last moment—abandon his slave girl and throw himself into the arms of the stately mezzo with the break in her register, actions which, from a purely acoustic point of view, she fully deserves. Amneris fervently strives to convince the tenor to renounce his slave girl, tells him it will cost him his life, but in response to her desperate pleas, the tragically infatuated tenor, having already turned his back on life, can only reply: “I cannot!” and “In vain!” —“Once more, renounce her!” —“I cannot.” —A blind rush toward death and the fiercest anguish of love unite in a duet of extraordinary beauty, but devoid of hope. Amneris’s cries of agony accompany the priests’ horrible formulaic response, which now rises muffled from the depths where a religious court is trying the unhappy Radames, who takes no part in the proceedings.

  “Radames, Radames,” the high priest sings urgently and makes it pointedly clear that he is to be charged with the crime of treason.

  “Defend yourself!” the chorus of priests demands.

  And when the high priest mentions that Radames has nothing to say, they unanimously agree he is guilty of treason.

  “Radames, Radames,” the chief judge begins again, “you deserted the field the day before the battle.”

  “Defend yourself!” the chorus cries out again.

  “You see, he is silent,” the totally biased judge notes for the second time.

  And so this time, too, all voices unite in the verdict of “Treason!”

  “Radames, Radames,” his remorseless accuser says for the third time. “You were false to your country, your king, your honor.”—The cry of “Defend yourself!” rings out anew. And finally, after once again being told that Radames has said not a single word, the priests announce their final, ominous verdict of “Treason!” And so the unavoidable cannot be avoided, and the chorus, their voices still in close harmonies, announce the sentence—his doom is sealed, he is to die the death of the damned, is to be buried alive in a grave beneath the temple of their angry god.

  You had to use your own imagination for Amneris’s outrage, since the music broke off here, and Hans Castorp had to change records. With downcast eyes, so to speak, he accomplished this with a few silent, deft movements; and when he sat down to listen again, it was the last scene of the melodrama that he heard: the final duet of Radames and Aida, sung at the bottom of their crypt, while above their heads bigoted, cruel priests, raising and spreading their hands in the ceremonies of their cult, lifted their voices in a dull murmur.

  “Tu—in questa tomba?” The question rang out in the indescribably alluring voice of Radames, a tenor at once both sweet and heroic, horrified and ecstatic. Yes, his beloved has found her way to him, the woman for whom he forfeited honor and life; she has been waiting for him here, to be locked in the tomb with him, to die with him. But it was what they now sang to each other, or at times with one another, concerning this situation, interrupted now and then by the muffled tones of the ceremonies several stories above—it was this exchange of song that deeply stirred the soul of the lonely, nocturnal listener, both in regard to the situation and its musical expression. The words spoke of heaven, but the very music was heavenly, was sung in heavenly voices. The melodic line that Radames’ and Aida’s voices insatiably followed, first each alone and then together, its simple, blissful arc playing between tonic and dominant, suspended too long at the keynote, then ascending to a halftone below the octave, fleetingly brushing it, and returning to the fifth—that melody seemed to the listener the most radiant, most admirable music he had ever heard. And yet he would have been less in love with its sound had it not been for the underlying situation, which prepared him emotionally to hear the sweet music emerging from it. It was so beautiful, the way Aida had found her way to doomed Radames to share his fate in the crypt for all eternity. And the condemned man quite rightly protested her sacrificing her own dear life; and yet in his gentle, desperate, “No, no! troppo sei bella,” one could hear his true ecstasy in being united at last with the woman he had assumed he would never see again. It required no effort of imagination for Hans Castorp to share in the tenor’s ecstasy and gratitude, but as he sat there with folded hands, staring at the little black louvers, from between whose slats this all burst forth, ultimately what he felt, understood, and relished was the victorious ideality of m
usic, of art, of human emotions, their sublime and incontrovertible ability to gloss over the crude horrors of reality. You had only to picture coolly and calmly what was actually happening here. Two people were being buried alive; their lungs full of the gases of the crypt, cramped with hunger, they would perish together, or even worse, one after the other; and then decay would do its unspeakable work on their bodies, until two skeletons lay there under those vaults, each indifferent and insensitive to whether it lay there alone or with another set of bones. That was the real, factual side of the matter—a set of facts that stood all to itself, that had nothing whatever to do with the idealism of the heart, and that was triumphantly vanquished by the spirit of beauty and music. For the Radames and Aida of the opera, this factual future did not exist. They let their voices sweep in unison to the blessed sustained note of the octave, secure in the belief that heaven was opening before them, that their longings were bathed in the light of eternity. The consoling power of beauty to gloss things over did its listener a great deal of good and contributed much to his special fondness for this segment of his favorite concert.

  It was his habit to relax from this terror and radiance by playing a second piece of brief, but concentrated charm—much more peaceful than the first, an idyll, but an exquisite idyll, painted and assembled with all the intricate economy of contemporary art. Purely instrumental, with no vocals, it was a symphonic prelude of French provenance, scored for a small ensemble, at least by modern standards, yet fitted out with all the tricks of modern tone coloring and cleverly calculated to set the soul spinning a web of dreams.

  This was the dream that Hans Castorp dreamed: He was lying on his back on a meadow sparkling in the sun and strewn with colorful asters, a little mound of earth under his head, one leg pulled up slightly, the other laid across it—and, let it be noted, they were the legs of a goat. Just for the pure joy of it, since he was quite alone on the meadow, he let his fingers play at the stops of a woodwind he held to his lips, a clarinet or reed pipe, from which he coaxed gentle, nasal tones, one after the other, purely at random, and yet in a satisfying sequence that rose carelessly into the deep blue sky, beneath which the foliage of a few solitary birches and ashes flickered in the sun as the breeze brushed past. And yet his tranquil semi-melody, his impulsive doodlings, were not the only voice in the solitude for very long. Insects humming in the hot summer air above the grasses, the sunshine itself, the soft breeze, the rustling treetops, the flickering foliage—the whole gently swaying, peaceful, summery scene around him became a blend of sounds that gave ever-changing, constantly surprising harmonic meaning to his simple pipings. The symphonic accompaniment sometimes fell away into silence; but goat-footed Hans continued to blow his naive, monotonous air and lure exquisitely colored, magical tones from nature—until finally, after a long pause, a series of new instrumental voices entered, tumbling rapidly, each higher than the other, their timbres rising in self-surmounting sweetness, until every richness, every fullness held back up to now, was realized for one fleeting moment, which contained within it the perfect blissful pleasures of eternity. The young faun was very happy on his summer meadow. There was no “defend yourself” here, no responsibility, no war tribunal of priests judging someone who had forgotten his honor, lost it somehow. It was depravity with the best of consciences, the idealized apotheosis of a total refusal to obey Western demands for an active life. To our nocturnal musician’s ears, this one piece’s soothing effects made it worth many others.

  And there was a third—made up of several records actually, three or four that belonged together and were to be played in sequence, since the tenor aria alone took up half of one disk of concentric rings. It was another French piece, an opera Hans Castorp knew well, one he had heard and seen repeatedly in the theater and to whose plot he had even alluded once in conversation—in a very crucial conversation. It was the music from the second act, in the Spanish tavern—a low dive, spacious, almost barnlike, with cloths on the tables and a kind of half-baked Moorish architecture. In a warm, slightly husky voice, both earthy and intriguing, Carmen declares she wants to dance with her corporal, and you can hear the castanets clattering now. At the same moment, however, trumpets—bugles—call from the distance, a repeated military signal that comes as no small shock to the little man. “Stop! Just a moment!” he cries and pricks up his ears like a horse. And when Carmen asks, “Why?” and wants to know what is going on, he cries, “Don’t you hear?”—amazed that the message is not as clear to her as it is to him. Those were trumpets from his barracks, a bugle call. “They are sounding the retreat,” he says operatically. But the Gypsy cannot understand and, more importantly, doesn’t want to. All the better, she says, half out of stupidity, half out of impudence, now she won’t need her castanets, heaven itself is sending her music to dance by and so—la la la la! He is beside himself. The pain of disappointment gives way to attempts to make clear to her what is happening and that no love affair in the world can prevail against this call. How is it possible, really, that she does not understand something so fundamental, so absolute? “I must return to camp, to quarters, for roll call,” he cries in despair at an ingenuousness that only doubles the burden his heart already feels. But listen to Carmen now! She is furious, outraged to the depths of her soul; her voice is all betrayal and injured love—or she makes it sound that way. “Back to quarters, for roll call?” And what about her heart? Her good, tender heart that in its stupidity—yes, she admits it, in its stupidity—was prepared to amuse him with song and dance? “Ta ra ta ta!” and in savage mockery she holds a rolled hand to her mouth to imitate the bugle call. “Ta ra ta ta!” And that does it. The idiot leaps up—he is leaving. Fine then, run along! Here, here are his cap, his sword and knapsack! Clear out, dear out, run along, back to the barracks! He begs for mercy. But she keeps up her hot scorn, she imitates him, and pretends to lose her head at the sound of the trumpets. Ta ra ta ta, back to roll call! Merciful heavens, he’s going to be late! Run along, there’s the bugle call, and of course he starts acting the fool just when she, Carmen, was going to dance for him. That, that, that, is his love for her!

  What an agonizing situation. She does not understand. This woman—this Gypsy—cannot, will not, understand. Does not want to—for without a doubt, her rage, her scorn, is not just for the moment, not merely personal, it is hatred, an ancient hostility to the principle behind those French bugles—or Spanish horns—that call her beloved little soldier back; and her highest ambition, both instinctive and impersonal, is to triumph over that principle. She uses a very simple means to get her way. She claims if he leaves, he does not love her; and that is precisely what José, there inside the cabinet, cannot bear. He implores her to let him speak. She refuses. Then he forces her to listen—a devilishly serious moment. Ominous sounds rose from the orchestra, a gloomy, threatening theme, which as Hans Castorp knew, moved through the whole opera until the catastrophic end, but here also served as the introduction to the little soldier’s aria—the next record. And he put it on now.

  “Through every long and lonely hour”—José sang it very beautifully; Hans Castorp often played this record by itself, removing it from its familiar context, and always listened in rapt sympathy. The content of the aria was not much, but the way it pleaded with such emotion touched him profoundly. The soldier sang about a flower that Carmen had tossed him when they first became acquainted and that had been his sole comfort in prison, where he had found himself on her account. In his inner turmoil, he admitted that there had been moments when he cursed fate for having placed Carmen in his path. But he had immediately repented of this blasphemy and on his knees begged God that he might see her again. Then—and this “then” was the same high note with which he had just sung his “to see you, dear Carmen, again”—then—and now the instrumental accompaniment unleashed all its available magic to paint the little soldier’s anguish and longing, his forlorn tenderness and sweet despair—then she had appeared in all her simple, fatal charm, and it
had been perfectly clear to him that he was “lost” (“lost” with a great sobbing grace note preceding it), was lost for good and all. “Oh, my Carmen,” he sang. “My being is yours,” he sang in desperation, repeating the same anguished melodic phrase, which the orchestra also picked up again on its own, ascending two notes up from the dominant and with deepest fervor moving back to the fifth below. “My heart is yours,” he assured her in trite, but tenderest excess, using that same melodic phrase again; now he moved up the scale to the sixth to add, “And I am eternally yours,” then let his voice sink ten intervals and in great agitation confessed, “Carmen, I love you”—the last few notes agonizingly sustained above shifting harmonies, before the “you” with its grace note finally resolved the chord.

  “Yes, yes,” Hans Castorp said in somber gratitude, and put on the finale, where everyone congratulated young José for standing up to his officer and thus cutting off his retreat, so that he would now have to desert the colors, just as Carmen had demanded, to his horror, only moments before.

  Oh, follow to the mountains fair,

  The hills and crags and purest air,

  the chorus sang—and you could understand the words quite clearly.

  To roam and walk with happy pride

  Your fatherland, the world so wide!

  You shall obey your will alone.

  A gift more rare than precious stone