The Magic Mountain

the rattle of castanets. But in the same moment, from a distance, the blare of trumpets swelled out, bugles giving a military signal, at which sound the little sergeant starts up. “One moment, stop!” he cries, and pricks up his ears like a horse. Why? What was it then, Carmen asked; and he: “Dost thou not hear?” astonished that the signal did not enter into her soul as into his. “Carmen, ’tis the retreat!” It is the trumpets from the garrison, giving the summons. “The hour draws nigh for our return,” says he, in operatic language. But the gipsy girl cannot understand, nor does she wish to. So much the better, she says, half stupidly, half pertly; she needs no castanets, for here is music dropped from the sky. Music to dance by, tra-la, tra-la! He is beside himself. His own disappointment retreats before his need to make clear to her how matters stand, and how no love-affair in the world can prevent obedience to this summons. How is it she cannot understand anything so fixed, so fundamental? “I must away, the signal summons me, to quarters!” he cries, in despair over a lack of understanding that doubly burdens his heavy heart. And now, hear Carmen! She is furious. Outraged to the depths of her soul, her voice is sheer betrayed and injured love⁠—or she makes it sound so. “To quarters? The signal?” And her heart? Her faithful, loving heart, just then, in its weakness, yes, she admitted, in its weakness, about to while away an hour with him in dance and song? “Tan-ta-ra!” And in a fury of scorn she sets her curled hand to her lips and imitates the horns: “Taran-tara!” And that was enough to make the fool leap up, on fire to be off! Good, then, let him be off, away with him! Here are helmet, sabre, and hanger⁠—away, away, away with him, let him be off, let him be off, off to the barracks! He pleads for mercy. But she goes on, scorching him with her scorn, mocking him, taking his place and showing in pantomime how at the sound of the horn he lost what little sense he had. Tan-tara! The signal! O heaven! he will come too late! Let him go, let him be off, for the summons sounds, and he, like a fool, makes to go, at the very moment when she would dance for him. From this time, so she will account his love!

He is in torments. She cannot understand. The woman, the gipsy girl, cannot, will not understand. Will not⁠—for in her rage and scorn speaks something more and larger than the moment and the personal: a hatred, a primeval hostility against that principle, which in the accents of these Spanish bugles⁠—or French horns⁠—called to the lovelorn little soldier. Over that it was her deepest, her inborn, her more than personal ambition to triumph. And she possesses a very simple means: she says that if he goes he does not love her⁠—precisely that which José cannot bear to hear. He beseeches her to let him speak. She will not. Then he compels her⁠—it is a deucedly serious moment, dull notes of fatality rise from the orchestra, a gloomy, ominous motif, which, as Hans Castorp knew, recurred throughout the opera, up to its fatal climax, and formed also the first phrase of the soldier’s aria, on the next plate, which had now to be inserted. “See here thy flow’ret treasured well”⁠—how exquisitely José sang that! Hans Castorp played this single record over and over, and listened with the deepest participation. As far as its contents went, it did not fetch the action much further; but its imploring emotion was moving in the highest degree. The young soldier sang of the flower Carmen had tossed him at the beginning of their acquaintance, which had been everything to him, in the arrest he had suffered for love of her. He confesses: “Sometimes I cursed the hour I met thee, and tried all vainly to forget thee”⁠—only next moment to rue his blasphemy, and pray on his knees to see her once more. And as he prayed⁠—striking the same high note as just before on the “To see thee, Carmen,” but now the orchestration lends all the resources of its enchantment to paint the anguish, the longing, the desperate tenderness, sweet despair, in the little soldier’s heart⁠—ah, there she stood before his eyes, in all her fatal charm; and clearly, unmistakably, he felt that he was undone, forever lost⁠—on the word “undone” came a sobbing whole-tone grace-note to the first syllable⁠—lost and forever undone. “Then would an ecstasy steal o’er me,” he despairingly asseverated in a recurrent melody repeated wailingly by the orchestra, rising two tones from the tonic and thence returning ardently to the fifth: “Carmen, my own,” he repeats, with infinite tenderness but rather tasteless redundancy, going all the way up the scale to the sixth, in order to add: “My life, my soul belongs to thee”⁠—after which he let his voice fall ten whole tones and in deepest emotion gave out the “Carmen, I love thee!” shuddering forth the words in anguish from a note sustained above changing harmonies, until the “thee” with the syllable before it was resolved in the full accord.

“Yes, ah, yes,” said Hans Castorp, with mournful satisfaction, and put on the finale: where they are all congratulating young José because the meeting with the officer has cut off his retreat, and now it only remains open to him to desert, as Carmen, to his horror, had before now demanded he should.

“Away to the mountains, away, away,
Share in our life, careless and gay,”

they sang in chorus⁠—one could understand the words quite well:

“Freely to roam, the world our home,
Gaily to pass o’er land and sea
And enjoy, all else excelling,
Sweet liberty!”

“Yes, yes,” he said, as before; and passed on to a fourth record, something very dear and good.

It is not our fault that it was French again,