The hills are alive with the sound of tourists

Festung Hohensalzburg

It seems really hard for Americans to grasp that Salzburg and The Sound of Music are not one in the same. Yes, there is a tour to the movie sites, and yes, it is popular, but only with people inclined to wear fanny packs. The mythology around the movie is astounding, and for a small place like Salzburg, it can be overwhelming. You’d be hard pressed to find any Salzburger that can sing “Edelweiss,” and you’ll likely get a heavy sigh and roll of the eyes for asking. For a lot of people, it seems obvious that there is more to the city, but what’s really alarming is that are even more people don’t seem to realize that.

When I knew that I was going to study in Salzburg (plane ticket bought, classes registered, money sent off), I set aside my hatred of musicals for about two hours and, for the first time in my life, watched Julie Andrews twittering about the city that would be my adopted home. That is to say, I fast-forwarded through all the singing and tried to focus on the scenery, which accounts for my recollections of the film being little more than hazy.

I arrived in Salzburg on a January evening, along with my busload of classmates, fresh off of an icy one-week tour through western Germany. My hostess, accompanied by a roundish boy — who I assumed was her son, but came to find out was the neighbor boy with a voracious appetite for food that his parents didn’t stock — whisked me off in a silver Peugeot to my new home.

We parked in the underground garage, and my heart did a little jump when I saw her press the top button in the elevator. The evening proceeded well in the penthouse (!), and my hosts were relieved to find that I spoke and understood German. That ascertained, we discussed the combined horror and silliness of both The Sound of Music, and of American politics over the past year and a half. They gingerly asked, eyebrows raised, if I really liked either of them. I happily professed my hatred, and they seemed relieved that they could freely mock both, which we all did.

Mirabell Gardens

I was sent off the next day, belly full of muesli, with directions that led me through a park, past the Mirabell Gardens, over the Tiffany-blue Salzach, and onto a platz that sat in the shadow of a yellow baroque church built by a man who I would come to know as JBFvE. Directly across the tiny lane from the church was a strip club (also reputed to be a brothel), which was, in my mind, an unspeakably wonderful juxtaposition. A few buildings up from that was my college, built into the side of the smallish mountain (a big hill, really) that is one of the geographical features that splits Salzburg up — the Mönchsberg.

During our in-class introduction to the city, the instructor gave notice that she was going to say things potentially unsavory to Sound of Music fans. Like the fact that Andrews and the von Trapp kids seem to have been in some sort of time warp, moving them to and from locations on opposite sides of the city in split seconds. Most charming to me, though, was the fact that if, as the movie depicted, the von Trapps had gotten out of town by going over the Untersberg, they would have landed not in Switzerland, but in Berchtesgaden, the German town that was Hitler’s Bavarian retreat. Switzerland requires a distinctly westward bent, and the journey would have taken them through two other Austrian provinces, and possibly another country altogether, what with Liechtenstein in the way.

In the afternoon, we were led on a walking tour of the city by a long-term student at the college named Dallas. He was an outdoorsy pseudo-hippie and a smart ass, and it was a particularly abrasive combination, though my opinion of him improved with familiarity. Though I’m by no means a teetotaler, I’m the weirdo who prefers sitting in a museum or staring up at buttresses to getting sloppy drunk, so the Dallas guide to Salzburg was of little use for me.

“This bar, blah blah blah. That bar, blah blah blah. Irish bar, blah blah blah. Oh, and Sound of Music, blah blah blah,” was what it amounted to in my ears. I wanted to know when that church over there was built and how to get to the train station.

Augustinerkirche

I eventually learned when most of the churches in Salzburg were built, though I never made it inside all of them, as they seemed to breed and sprout up weekly. Salzburg, a.k.a. the Rome of the North, is so nicknamed for being slathered in ecclesiastical Baroque, and that is thanks to a handful of Prince Archbishops who made ample use of the architectural talents of Italian Santino Solari and native Austrian Johan Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (JBFvE). It’s virtually safe to say (of the more significant buildings in town), that what one didn’t build, the other did.

A few Prince Archbishops’ proclivity for megalomania, and other personal habits not particularly suited to archbishops, led to the look of the town. Wolf Dietrich ordered the tearing down of the most significant Romanesque cathedral north of the Alps after it sustained minimal fire damage, simply because he wasn’t nuts about Romanesque. After some quarrelling about salt mining, Wolf Dietrich was thrown in the fortress by his naughty nephew, successor, and bearer of an anachronistic name, Markus Sitticus. It was Markus Sitticus who hired Solari to build the cathedral that is now standing, still frothy despite its being refurbished after a bomb fell squarely through the dome during World War II.

Mirabell Gardens

Wolf Dietrich’s questionable architectural behavior didn’t stop with the tearing down of the magnificent cathedral, causing the displacement of many long-resting skeletons, many of which belonged to his predecessors. He contributed another of the city’s landmarks, around which the von Trapps skipped and squeaked — the Mirabell Palace. Another Baroque frothball, it was called Altenau until Markus Sitticus came along and, presumably, changed the name to save a little face for his office. “Altenau” stems from the last name “Alt” — more specifically, from the last name of Wolf Dietrich’s mistress. At this point, it’s good to remember that he was Salzburg’s Prince, and here’s the operative word, Archbishop. So, not just a Catholic priest, but a super-, extra-Catholic priest. Vows of celibacy tossed by the wayside, Wolf Dietrich and Miss Salome Alt spent enough time together to produce 15 children, ten of whom survived, and he constructed Altenau in her honor. Gems like these make Salzburg history tasty, but the tourism industry insists on The Sound of Music haunting the city.

A few weeks into the semester, we were taken on a walking field trip to what had been the site of the college up until a few years before. It was a lovely Salzburg day, damp and grey, and we walked through the Mönchsberg to the part of town that sits on the other side. We strolled along pastures dotted with grazing sheep and cows and horses, and ended up at a small Baroque palace. The college had been in one of the buildings on the grounds, but we were given a tour of the palace. We were told that this was a special privilege because it was private property, and because the general policy of the grounds’ staff was to practically beat away any curious people that should come by it. The palace, it turns out, or at least the palace’s backside, was the setting for the outside scenes in that movie, and tourists were overrunning the grounds when left unchecked. Though the palace was beautiful, I was unfazed by the connection, and had not recognized it. My heart sank a little, knowing that the movie continued to write its own sketchy history on the city.

Salzburg Altstadt

During my time there, I learned the back streets of Salzburg well enough to give directions to the many people who inexplicably picked me out as a guide. I found out which cafés had good wait staff and boring cakes, which had killer cakes and wait staff (though killer was in a more literal sense for the later), and finally found the one that had perfect examples of both. I loved it in Salzburg — I enjoyed gossip magazines over perfect, sludgy hot chocolate, had remedies whipped up at the apothecary, and chatted with the greengrocer at the register. If you bar the movie from your head, Salzburg comes to life in its own perfect way.

The window in my bathroom looked out toward the edge of town, and on a distant green hillside, bright white and upright as a tooth, sat the Maria Plain church. It’s the church where Mr. von Trapp marries Ms. Julie-Andrew’s-character, and I made a point of never going there. Had I gone there, I’m sure I would been mobbed by people scampering around their with cameras flashing, and I fear that some of them would have been singing insipid songs. But from my vantage point, looking at it while brushing my teeth and wearing a towel, it was a quiet place, still beautiful and holy, a part of a small city and a part of my life in it.