Aida and the Power of Music (MM30) (2023) Pintura por Noël Van Hoof

Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain – Part 30

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 ecstacy 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 music, 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 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.

(English translation by John E. Woods)

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