The Magic Mountain

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Languages: German, English

Hans Castorp travels to the mountains to visit his cousin at a sanatorium. He plans to stay for three weeks. Somehow, that turns into seven years.

Up there, time follows its own rules and flows freely. The days are carefully structured by routines. Time and again, the same people gather at the same table. They eat, observe one another, talk, wait. Almost nothing happens, and yet, at the same time, entire lives unfold in gestures, encounters, and tiny details: an attraction, an argument, a shifting conviction; someone arrives, someone is suddenly gone.

In her contemporary exploration of Thomas Mann’s novel, Kapitolina Tsvetkova conceives of the mountain less as a place than as a particular state of being. A cultured society remains safely above the world, discussing its crises in an intelligent manner, while at the same time becoming increasingly incapable of action. The more closely it observes and analyzes, the more observation itself threatens to become a form of paralysis. And where does the line between observing and being observed lie? The play culminates in a harpsichord concerto in which time seems to become fluid and our relationship to death oscillates between attraction, fear, and acceptance. The music thus becomes a possible sublimation of the inevitable.

Time expands and contracts; the everyday takes on a strange intensity. Food, smell, temperature, sound, closeness, and the presence of other bodies are just as important as words. Death is discussed. Yet it is hardly tragic: it can become erotic, ridiculous, fascinating, frightening, intimate, and sometimes almost mundane.

The mountain itself constantly shifts its distance from us. The shifting video landscape by Carmen Kleykens Vidal and the lighting by Luciano Correa Barraza accompany a world in which duration, memory, and the boundary between closeness and distance become increasingly uncertain.

In 2026, Thomas Mann’s work entered the public domain in Europe. We are taking this moment as an opportunity to re-release this masterpiece into the present.

Cast:
Director: KAPITOLINA TSVETKOVA
Video Design: CARMEN KLEYKENS VIDAL
Lighting Design: LUCIANO CORREA BARRAZA
Ensemble: STUDENTS OF THE HfMT HAMBURG
Production Manager: NORA EBNETH
Project Coordination (ligeti zentrum): BENJAMIN HELMER
Sound: KATHARINA RASPE, GIOVANNI DINELLO
Lighting BIRGER VON LEESEN, GERALD TIMMANN
Technical Director, Forum OLIVER KIRSCHNER

Eintritt: 12,00 EUR
Ermäßigt: 6,00 EUR
HfMT-Studierende: frei

More information about ticketing will be posted here shortly.

A collaboration with the ligeti zentrum. Supported and sponsored by the ligeti zentrum and the Hamburg University of Music and Drama.
The ligeti zentrum is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the City of Hamburg as part of the federal-state initiative “Innovative University.”

Event Schedule
October 18, 2026, 7:00 p.m.
October 19, 2026, 7:00 p.m.