Welcome to The Magic Mountain!


If you hope to hold a listener's attention for 37 hours, you'd better capture it at once, and David Rintoul does that. His reading of Thomas Mann's classic novel, in John E. Wood's marvelously fluent translation, is alluring right from the start, but in such a matter-of-fact way that listeners may be enchanted before they know what's happening (click here to listen):


An ordinary young man was on his way
from his hometown of Hamburg
to Davos-Platz in the canton of Graübunden.
It was the height of summer,
and he planned to stay for three weeks.


Hans Castorp's journey to visit his cousin Joachim at the Berghof Sanatorium, high in the Swiss Alps, will turn into a stay that is measured in years, not weeks. Before he's through, every idea in his head that summer afternoon will be challenged -- and most of them found wanting. This is a classic German Bildungsroman: the story of a character's moral growth. Yet at times it seems a parody, ironically questioning whether such growth is even possible. Rintoul keeps both sides of that ambiguity alive.

But what makes this audiobook so extraordinary is Rintoul's richly imaginative portrayal of Mann's characters: not just Hans, an engineer-in-training with a curious mind, but the entire international company of patients who come and go at the sanatorium, culminating in Mynheer Peeperkorn, the large-than-life Dutchman whose charisma overwhelms everyone, although he often fails to complete a sentence. The fellow would not be out of place in Dickens. 

David Rintoul and Greg Haiste, preparing for Jessica Swales' 
Nell Gwynn at the Globe Theatre (Photo: Tristram Kenton)

Rintoul is just as successful with the narrator, whose cheerfully modest demeanor acts as a foil for Hans' strivings -- both to get well and to make sense of his life and the world around him. Rintoul's delivery is pitch-perfect, as when he addresses the gulf between the pre-war years at the Berghof and the readers of 1924. The narrator informs us that Hans' story "took place back then, long ago, in the old days of the world before the Great War, with whose beginnings so many things began; whose beginnings, it seems, have not yet ceased. But is not the pastness of a story that much more profound, more complete, more like a fairy tale, the tighter it fits up against the 'before'?"

The novel is certainly an enormous canvas, with room for evocative depictions of Alpine scenery alongside Mann's spirited dialogues and the expositions about physiology, which are as expansive as those about whales in Moby Dick. Rinoul has a prodigious ability to adjust his tone, tempo and dynamics for each of these, always keeping Mann's broader concept in view, just as a conductor must do with a Mahler symphony. Every variation is wisely judged.

The first German edition of Der Zauberberg in 1924
(Photo: H.-P. Haack, Leipzig)

Those who know the book will relish Rintoul's incarnations of Joachim Ziemßen, Hans' dutiful, soldier cousin; Clawdia Chauchat, the young woman Hans loves; Lodovico Settembrini, who guides his adventures in philosophy; Leo Naptha, who tries to make a Jesuit of him; and Director Behrens, the melancholy surgeon presiding over the Berghof's guests. Newcomers will find that the novel has lost none of its lustre, although readers have been enjoying and pondering Mann's story for nearly a century.

As for me, I'm already halfway through my second listen.

Christoph Eichhorn in the 1982 film adaptation by Hans W. Geißendörfer


My Hans is really a simple-minded hero, the young scion of good Hamburg society, and an indifferent engineer. But in the hermetic, feverish atmosphere of the enchanted mountain, the ordinary stuff of which he is made undergoes a heightening process that makes him capable of adventures in sensual, moral, intellectual spheres he would never have dreamed of in the “flatland.”

(From Thomas Mann's "The Making of The Magic Mountain", which appeared in The Atlantic in 1953: see the first link above.)

Photo: the author in New York in 1943 by Fred Stein.

October 4, 2022

New songs from Anna Depenbusch

Anna Depenbusch (Bayerischen Rundfunks)

Anna Depenbusch, one of Germany's leading singer/songwriters, has released "Kingfisher Frau"-- the first song from her new album ---- in an intimate performance from Berlin's Meisterhall, an historic concert venue built in 1910.

"Kingfisher Frau" is dedicated to pioneering German mathematician Emmy Noether, but it speaks eloquently about anyone who, to use Depenbusch's metaphor, breaks from the ranks of the chorus and sings a song of her own.

Under the video, I've posted my translation of the lyrics, taking care to match the cadences of the German. I hope you'll like it.




Come on, let her dream what she wants to--
she will do that anyway.
A director is handing out roles:
Don Juan and Romeo.

Amidst the choir, half shadow, half light,
right past the tenor a new face steps out,
glittering feathers and heart deep-sea blue,
and she’s singing her song--
Kingfisher Frau.

Come on, let her think what she wants to--
she will do that anyway;
they sing the song they’re supposed to
in an opera called Figaro.

But for you the stage here is just too small.
I think these supporting roles no longer fit.
You shine so much brighter than spotlights can shine,
and we hear your voice all the way up in the very back row.

Amidst the choir, half shadow, half light,
right past the tenor a new face steps out,
glittering feathers and heart deep-sea blue,
and she’s singing her song--

Now for you the stage here is just too small.
It’s been so long now since supporting roles fit.
You shine so much brighter than spotlights can shine,
and we hear your voice all the way up in the very back row.

Glittering feathers and heart deep-sea blue,
as you’re singing your song--
Kingfisher Frau.

Come on, let her say what she wants to--
She will shine anyway.


Depenbusch will record her new album in a studio, but in a single take and with a small audience. Hence the title, Echtzeit (Real Time).