Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain

(4.7 stars; 34 reviews)

Thomas Mann The Magic Mountain Dramatised by Olwen Wymark In 1907, Hans Castorp , a young engineer, travels to a sanatorium in the Alps to visit his tubercular cousin Joachim. Before Hans can leave he is himself diagnosed with TB and ends up staying for seven years. He loses all sense of time and gives himself up to a community with its own rules and morality. During his stay, 
Hans falls in love with a beautiful Russian patient, Clavdia, who does not return his love. She leaves the sanatorium and Hans clings to his illness in orderto wait for her return. It is only the imminent threat of the First World War that at last provokes him to return to the life he left so long ago. Music composed by Colin Sell. Directed in Wales by Alison Hindell CAST: Voice of Thomas Mann:………Paul Scofield Hans Castorp:………Robert Whitelock Settembrini:………Clive Merrison Clavdia:……….Sian Thomas Joachim:……….Simon Ludders Dr Behrens:……….John Hartley Peeperkorn:……….Norman Rodway Naphta:……….Rhodrl Hugh Dr Krokowski:…………Richard Elfyn Frau Stohr:………Christine Pritchard Fraulein Englhardt:………Manon Edwards Wehsal:…….Tim Klrkus Hermine:…….Jennifer Vaughan Veronique:…….Claire Cage Sunday Play: The Magic Mountain OTX Sun 1st Apr 2001, 19:30 on BBC Radio 3 The Magic Mountain, a novel by Thomas Mann, first published in German in November 1924, is widely considered to be one of the most influential works of twentieth-century German literature. In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

This recording is part of the Old Time Radio collection.