If you’d like to prepare for reading and discussing the novel together this fall, start with some of these things over the summer. These are for both Davidson College students and DavidsonLearns students.
biographical and key background sources
I can highly recommend Colm Tóibín’s novel The Magician, a fictional biography of Thomas Mann. (NY: Scribner, 2021), ISBN 978-1-4767-8509-7.
Further, these essays primary to the initial reception of Mann in the US can help situate our readings in the period, by Georg Lukács, a contemporary and early Marxist critic, and Erich Heller, a formative scholar who works to summarize much of the early reception of Mann, especially in the US, when Mann was here. Also Erich Heller was the Doktorvater (mentor, dissertation advisor) of my teacher Douglas Stott at Northwestern in the 1970s; Doug Stott led and taught students during the Davidson JYA year in Marburg 1982-83, which I took part in as a transfer student from Chicago. So there’s that.
- Erich Heller, from Thomas Mann: The Ironic German (South Bend: Regnery/Gateway, 1958).
- link to chapters to follow (maybe…)
- Georg Lukács, Essays on Thomas Mann, translated by Stanley Mitchell (NY: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964).
narratology
Dorrit Cohn
Umberto Eco
Musik im Zauberberg
Music takes on an important role in the Magic Mountain. Familiarize yourselves with the specific pieces that show up in the novel, and perhaps also with the composers, the Romantic period and styles, their interests and ideas.
In the chapter “Fülle des Wohllauts” (“Fullness of Harmony”) we hear of Verdi’s Aida, Debussy’s Prelude a l’apris- midi d’un faune, scenes from Bizet’s Carmen, an aria from Gounod’s Opera Faust and finally of Schubert’s “Lindenbaum.” The music emanates from “an overflowing cornucopia of artistic pleasure, of delights for the soul from merry to somber. It was a musical apparatus. It was a gramophone.” (627)
Some links to get you started.
- Schubert, “Lindenbaum” — listen to this over and over!
Thomas Quasthoff with Daniel Barenboim, in a stunning performance from 2005 in the Berliner Philharmonie. The high-quality version on the visual album through TIDAL is here (requires a TIDAL subscription). Bootleg of that performance in low quality is here. A classic live performance by Dietrich Fischer-Diskau with Alfred Brendel from 1979 is here. And perhaps the defining modern performance by Dietrich Fischer-Diskau with Gerard Moore, recorded for the BBC in 1959 is here. - Gounod’s Faust. Here is a period recording. Hans Castorp would have been listening to something like this on the gramophone.
Here is a solid contemporary Faust recording from 1987 with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks and Kiri Te Kanawa, Francisco Araiza, Evgeny Nesterenko, led by Sir Colin Davis. TIDAL link in high quality, subscription required. Pirate upload on youtube. - Verdi’s Aida. Here is a fabulous recent performance at the Teatro dell’Opera di Roma under the direction of Michele Mariotti (available on Opera Vision, the European Union’s Creative Europe program, until mid-October. Here is a period recording that would have been in the collection that Hans had access to in the novel.
- Debussy Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, here with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in a wonderful performance directed by Leonard Bernstein from his tenure as the Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard in 1972-73. See the whole lecture here, framed by Bernstein here in a very Cold War context.
- Bizet’s Carmen. Here is a period recording by Jeanne Gerville-Réache from 1910. Hans would have been listening to this or something very much like it. A full contemporary Carmen by the excellent regional Teatro Municipale “Romolo Valli” in Italy is here, in all its pandemic (masks!) glory, with Martina Belli as Carmen. This is a great performance from the depths of the pandemic in Italy.
Davidson College students see Helmut Gutmann, “Das Musikkapitel in Thomas Manns Zauberberg,” The German Quarterly, 47:3 (May 1974): pp. 415-431.
