A Magic Mountain playlist

Here it is – Hans Castorp’s personal playlist from The Magic Mountain!



'The Magic Mountain' is less entirely inhabited and structured by music than Thomas Mann’s later great novel, 'Doctor Faustus' (1948), which merges the legend of the demonic pact with composer Adrian Leverkühn’s overweening artistic ambition, all recounted by his childhood friend Serenus Zeitblom.

Nevertheless, the earlier novel is musical in the sense that it features recurring linguistic leitmotifs such as the adjectives and attributes used to describe the main characters. For instance, Hans Castorp is always identifiable by the adjectives ‘young’ and ‘simple’, Joachim Ziemssen is always ‘honour-loving’, Mynheer Peeperkorn has his blaze of white hair, his mighty wrinkled brow and the circle of his thumb and forefinger; and Naphta is never anything but ‘astringent’. An operation akin to Prokofiev’s 'Peter and the Wolf' is afoot – a signature tune for each major figure.

Mann refers to his novel as a ‘symphony, a work of counterpoint, a tissue of themes’ (Einführung in den “Zauberberg”, 611). Indeed, the title of the novel was inspired by the Venusberg in Wagner’s Romantic opera 'Tannhäuser'.

The word ‘music’ crops up 74 times in the novel, and ‘musical’ ten. It only struck me when reading over my translation that there is music everywhere; indeed, one of the narratorial refrains is ‘Here too there was music’ – wafting up from the valley during his first nap; bands playing outside the Kurhaus, at the racecourse, the cinema and the bob run. A mediocre local singer performs at the Berghof, and the piano is often belaboured there, for example during the Walpurgis Night celebrations. Hans Castorp adores the thought that even polar explorers probably listen to music and smoke cigars, as well as celebrating Christmas.

There is a whole constellation of issues associated with music. Settembrini refers to it as ‘dangerous’ and ‘politically dubious’ because it works like opium on the mind and soul; and that is part of its attraction to Hans Castorp ‘who loved music passionately because it had a similar effect on him as his morning pint of porter—profoundly soothing, numbing, lulling him into a doze’ (GKFA, 62). When he dreams by a stream of his boyhood crush on his classmate Pribislav Hippe, prompted by the boy’s resemblance to Clavdia Chauchat, it is mentioned that he ‘loved the rush of water as much as he loved music’ (p. 182). Music, like water, like smoking, symbolises the perilous pull of sensuality, slumber and, ultimately, death. Indeed, Settembrini remarks to Castorp: 'Beer, tobacco and music,’ he said. ‘That’s your fatherland, right there!’ The German 'Rausch' or intoxication, leading to dark domains.

As Claudio Steiger observed in a 2011 article titled ‘Eine »innerlich und räumlich weitläufige Komposition« Musik, Zeit und Raum in Thomas Manns Der Zauberberg’: ‘Music assumes its central role in the text through the motifs of a Romantic obliviousness to time and Castorp’s fascination with death, and it is virtually the thematic “master code” of the novel.’

It intertwines with two of the novel’s other themes – time and storytelling – in the chapter ‘A walk on the beach’:
‘The time element of music is one thing and one thing only: an excerpt of human existence into which it pours to ennoble and elevate it to untold heights. A story, on the other hand, has two varieties of time: firstly, its own, the musical and real kind that determines its unfolding and its appearance; secondly, though, there is the time of its content, which depends on perspective to such a different degree that the imaginary time of a story almost, indeed entirely, corresponds to that of music, but it can also be light years away from it. A piece of music called ‘Five-Minute Waltz’ lasts five minutes—this is its one and only relationship to time. However, a story whose internal timespan was five minutes could, by virtue of inordinate diligence in filling out those five minutes, last a thousand times longer […]'

Yet the musical theme reaches its apogee in the chapter ‘Fülle des Wohllauts’, a title I may translate as ‘Abundance of melodies’. Hans Castorp has been at the sanatorium for several years when a gramophone is purchased – and in a sign of his maturity, confidence and control, he appropriates it. He orders and classifies the records and stands guard over the device, convinced that only he can use it properly. Night after night, he listens to his favourite records and in the daytime his DJing draws appreciative crowds. The Spotify playlist I have 'curated' includes the tracks and tunes I can identify from the narrator's descriptions.

It is notable that three of the five pieces of music he selects are by French composers (Berlioz, Debussy, Gounod) – products of an artificial, enlightened country that Mann, during his nationalist phase around WWI, considered to be at odds with German culture. There isn't a single French patient at the sanatorium, but here in music is perhaps a signal of Castorp’s espousal of a more inclusive personal philosophy embracing European culture as a whole.

The most important piece of music for Castorp at the end of the novel is, however, Schubert’s setting of the poem ‘The Linden Tree’ as part of his Winterreise song cycle because he realises that a ‘spiritual sympathy with it was a sympathy with death’. It is the epitome of the Romantic urge, and it is on his lips in the novel's devastating final scene.

As a great music buff, Thomas Mann describes these five pieces of music with great sensitivity and knowledge. His diaries contain many mentions of buying records, and he often gave evening gramopohone ‘concerts’ for his family. (Above photo: ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Thomas-Mann-Archiv)

overview previous next