Thomas Mann sets his novel The Magic Mountain in a tuberculosis sanatorium, using it as a stage for analyzing a wide range of characters who, in a peculiar combination of diseased lungs and leisurely rest in the fresh air, live at an altitude of over 1,500 meters. According to one character, they dwell in the deepest circles of hell. Through this setting, the novel becomes a platform for examining the condition of civilization. At its center is a protagonist who is emphasized as being entirely unremarkable – defined only by his background – a kind of man without qualities living in interesting times. In this way, the novel becomes a testimony to the illness of an entire civilization.

The play The Magic Mountain emerges from a year-long research project inspired by the themes and motifs of Mann’s iconic novel, aiming to formulate responses to questions about the relationship between the individual and time, and between a person and the epoch they inhabit – and which inhabits them. Conceived as a genre-diverse triptych, each part explores one of the thematic cores of Mann’s work. Its premiere within the KotorArt festival and Don Branko’s Music Days is a kind of pre-premiere, offering audiences a glimpse into the play’s central segment, Walpurgis Night – a musical and theatrical work that explores the carnivalesque banality of life. In this context, illness and the proximity of death do not prompt confrontation, but instead become thoughts that must be banished at all costs. The phrase “to live life to the fullest” becomes a kind of modus vivendi. Yet the freedom afforded by the carnival mask and total surrender to pleasure cannot hide the fact that the lungs are rotting from within. Drawing on fragments of Mann’s narrative and musical reminiscences of Claude Debussy’s symphonic poem Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un faune – realized through a combination of live electronics, brass, and percussion – we construct a narrative of the celebratory and destructive hedonism of our civilization.
Mirko Radonjić