‘Did you want a picture of you standing here with your hands up in the air like Maria? Honestly, there’s nothing I haven’t seen.’ Either side of the entrance to the Mirabell Gardens in Salzburg, 17th-century versions of the Hellenistic sculpture known as the Borghese Gladiator stretch towards each other, leading the eye down a tree-lined avenue to the garden’s palace. My tour guide, Naomi Mogil, is suggesting I might like to recreate a moment from The Sound of Music, when the Von Trapp children strike balletic poses imitating the sculptures while their governess Maria (Julie Andrews) stands centrally, arms stretched to the sky. I didn’t particularly want to stand there with my hands in the air like Maria, but what’s the point of signing up for a Sound of Music tour if you’re not prepared to look as ludicrous as lederhosen? So I oblige and take up the position with as much ‘Do Re Mi’ dash as I can muster, attracting backwards glances from Salzburgers on their way to work.
Baroque interpretations of the Borghese Gladiator flank the entrance to the Mirabell Gardens. Photo: Patrick Langwallner; © Tourismus Salzburg GmbH
It is 60 years since the film version of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s stage musical was released, and the denizens of Salzburg continue to be perplexed by the many fans who flock to the city – where much of the movie was shot – to re-enact a few of their favourite things. While most Salzburgers, Mogil tells me, are familiar with a German film from 1956 (Die Trapp-Familie) based on Maria von Trapp’s memoir published seven years earlier, about 70 per cent of them, she estimates, have never seen the Hollywood hit from 1965 (it received five Academy Awards, and is one of the highest-grossing films of all time).
They must be impressed, then, by the enthusiasm with which coachloads of tourists from all over the world greet the baroque landscaping of the Mirabell Gardens – dancing round its Pegasus Fountain in a line, patting the head of one of its 17th-century dwarf statues, racing through its ivy-covered pergola. How nice, those Salzburgers must think, that visitors show so much appreciation for the gardens laid out by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach. Apprenticed under Bernini in Rome, Fischer was court architect to three successive Habsburg emperors, as well as working for Johann Ernst von Thun, prince archbishop of Salzburg from 1687 until his death two decades later. Fischer is responsible for some of the most striking of the city’s many churches, including the Holy Trinity, with its concave front, and the wonderfully eccentric Collegiate Church, which has a convex central facade. As Mogil puts it, ‘the two fit into each other like spoons in a drawer – and that’s how Fischer linked the new and the old town’. Around 1690, Von Thun asked him to redesign the gardens of the Mirabell palace, which one of his predecessors, archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau, had had built in 1606 for his mistress Salome Alt and their 15 children. It would be seven children of Hollywood, however, who would really put the place on the tourist map.
The Pegasus Fountain in the Mirabell Gardens. The copper Pegasus was forged in 1661 by Caspar Gras, commissioned by Archbishop Guidobald von Thun for a horse-pond on the Kapitelplatz. After gracing several different squares in Salzburg’s Old Town, the sculpture was placed here in 1913. Photo: Sophie Barling
As we walk from the Mirabellgarten to the Salzach river, Mogil points out buildings associated with various sons of Salzburg – Mozart, of course, Christian Doppler, Herbert von Karajan. We cross the water over a bridge named after Marko Feingold, an Austrian who survived Auschwitz and then three concentration camps in Germany before ending up, after the war, in Salzburg. Amid lingering antisemitism in Europe, Feingold was instrumental in helping thousands of displaced Jews out of Austria and into Italy via the Krimml Pass, a dangerous 19-kilometre Alpine route that reaches an altitude of more than 2,600 metres. Mogil believes this may have inspired The Sound of Music’s ending, which sees the Von Trapps escaping Nazi officials post-Anschluss in 1938 and walking over the mountains, supposedly into Switzerland. As adult viewers, we’re asked to suspend any geographical awareness, given that the nearest Swiss border is some 340km away, and that the tuneful family is blithely headed towards Bavaria. ‘If the camera had swerved a little further over,’ Mogil observes, ‘you would see the Eagle’s Nest.’ But by this point in the film, the nuns have thwarted the Nazis with unsuspected mechanical skills, Christopher Plummer is wearing fetching ‘travelling clothes’, and some of us may be tearfully singing along to a reprise of ‘Climb Every Mountain’: I for one am happy to suspend my disbelief. The reality was that the Von Trapps managed to get a train to Italy the day before the border was closed – their escape necessary not because former navy officer Georg von Trapp had been called up to serve the Third Reich (at 58, he would have been too old), but because the family had been asked to sing at Hitler’s birthday, and had refused.
On the west side of the Salsach, the extent to which this city has been hewn out of the hills is abundantly clear. A cliff face looms over a run of pretty pastel-coloured houses dating from the early 15th century. ‘They’re built into the rock,’ Mogil says, ‘the back rooms are literally caves.’ Ever since a rock fall from the Mönchsberg in 1669 killed more than 200 people, Salzburg has had a guild of Bergputzer, or mountain polishers, who regularly abseil down the cliff face making sure alles in Ordnung. From here you can take a lift up to the Museum of Modern Art, formerly a dance café, then a casino.
Moving south-east with the town’s edge along the hillside, we pass the concert halls of the Salzburg Festival, the largest of which was once the stables of the prince-archbishops (‘The only clippety-clop now is that of expensive high-heels,’ my guide quips). The smaller Felsenreitschule, or Summer Riding School, was designed by Fischer in 1633, and carved out of a section of the Mönchsberg that had already been quarried to provide stone for the cathedral. Its 96 arches made a suitably dramatic backdrop to The Sound of Music’s concert scene, in which the Von Trapps sing under the watchful eyes of Nazi guards. We’re introduced to the building a little earlier in the film, when Austria has been annexed, and arch-villain Herr Zeller sweeps in to find Max Detweiler rehearsing the children. The Nazi flag hangs from the Alte Residenz, German troops march across the main square – and the brutalism of the architect and stage designer Clemens Holzmeister’s 1930s additions to the concert halls, which include a monumental external staircase with giant serpent snaking down its side, perfectly suits the shift in mood. (Holzmeister himself was removed as director of the Austrian Academy of Fine Arts by the Nazi regime, and had his offices and papers seized; he was in Turkey at the time, and stayed away from Austria until the 1950s, when he returned to resume work for the Salzburg Festival.)
A view of the russet-domed Nonnberg Abbey from the Kapuzinerberg. Photo © Tourismus Salzburg GmbH
Our walking tour finished, Mogil leaves me with two good tips. The first is where to find the best strudel – which should on no account, she says, be made with puff pastry, but rather with dough ‘pulled over the back of your hands until it’s so thin you can read a newspaper through it, then rolled up with apples in a bed sheet’. Her second tip finds me, at 5pm, up at Nonnberg Abbey to hear the resident Benedictine nuns sing vespers. Easily distinguishable from the many other churches of Salzburg by its russet onion dome, Nonnberg (literally ‘nun mountain’) was founded in the eighth century, and was indeed host many centuries later to a postulant named Maria Kutschera before she was sent to tutor the children of Georg von Trapp. The wrought-iron entrance gates and exterior are thrillingly familiar from the film – think of Maria singing ‘What will this day be like?’ as she leaves the convent with her drab clothes and carpet bag, or Sister Berthe ever so coolly unlocking the gates at the insistence of Nazi officials before they storm the place. The interiors in the movie were Hollywood sets, but the real convent church is an equally atmospheric medley of late gothic tracery with Romanesque remnants and 18th-century additions. Faded 12th-century frescos can be glimpsed underneath the nuns’ choir, and I’m told that the old convent apothecary, from which the enclosed sisters used to dispense remedies to Salzburgers in a lowered basket, is still intact. As the voices of the 15 cloistered nuns are piped into the church from their choir, I can’t help thinking they could do with a bit of help from Julie Andrews – even if the repertoire is more Gregorian chant than ‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’
Any yearning I might have to hear a bit of Richard Rodgers is more than satisfied the next day, when I join an Original Sound of Music Tour. In summer, when the operator Panorama Tours accommodates 200–400 people per day, these outings are made in large coaches colourfully branded with scenes and locations from the film. We’re in low season, however, so nine of us – a mother and daughter from Phoenix, a family of three from Singapore, a couple from Sri Lanka, me, and our guide, Richard – climb into a nondescript minivan. It’s all fairly intimate, so the sing-along element of our journey, as the car speakers treat us to ‘My Favorite Things’, is a little dampened by embarrassment.
View from the garden of Schloss Leopoldskron, with the Untersberg in the distance. Photo: Sophie Barling
Our first stop out of town is the 18th-century Schloss Leopoldskron, whose spectacular lakeside position, with the Untersberg mountain in the distance, provided the views looking outwards from the Von Trapp garden – as well as the location for the boat scene, when Maria and the children fall into the water (plus, who can forget the wonderfully child-averse Baroness Schraeder attempting a ballgame with the children?). For some years before the war the schloss was owned by theatre director Max Reinhardt, who co-founded the Salzburg Festival and was almost certainly a model for the character of Max Detweiler. Having fled Austria in the 1930s, Reinhardt worked in Hollywood during the Second World War. Since 1947 Schloss Leopoldskron has been owned by the Harvard-connected non-profit organisation Salzburg Global.
Back in the minivan, ‘Sixteen Going on Seventeen’ is up on the playlist, giving a clue as to our next location – and reminding me that, even before he turns full-on Nazi, Rolfe is a rotter (‘Your life, little girl, is an empty page that men will want to write on’). The grounds of Hellbrunn Palace, built in the early 17th century for another prince-archbishop, are now home to the gazebo that features in love scenes between Liesl and Rolfe and Maria and Captain von Trapp. The structure was moved here from its original filming location at Leopoldskron, and also had a Hollywood ‘double’ for interior scenes – but this doesn’t discourage the biggest fans in our group from posing for photos in front of it to calls of ‘Kiss! Kiss!’ from onlookers. Up a tree-lined avenue nearby, tour-guide Richard gamely demonstrates the way Maria skipped and clicked her heels as she sang ‘I Have Confidence’, before pointing out another yellow-coloured palace that provided the façade of the Von Trapp house (the interiors were a Hollywood confection; the family’s real house, in a suburb of Salzburg, was not used, and is not visitable). Finally, a drive to the town of Mondsee to see the flamboyantly baroque church where the wedding scene was filmed (in reality the couple had a more modest ceremony at Nonnberg) takes us into the spectacular Lake District, which was given the best ad it could wish for in the opening minutes of the film, shot from a helicopter.
The Sound of Music gazebo in the grounds of Hellbrunn Palace, just outside Salzburg. Photo: Patrick Langwallner; © Tourismus Salzburg GmbH
Some entertaining facts learned on the tour: Charmian Carr, who played Liesl, was later Michael Jackson’s interior designer; Georg von Trapp’s first wife, Agathe, was the granddaughter of the man who invented the torpedo; the real Maria von Trapp appears in the background in one sequence of ‘I Have Confidence’; and in 1984, President Reagan arranged for ‘Edelweiss’ to be performed to accompany the Austrian ambassador’s arrival at a White House banquet, under the mistaken impression that the song was Austria’s national anthem.
Julie Andrews as Maria sings ‘Do-Re-Mi’ in The Sound of Music (1965). Photo: Michael Ochs Archives via Getty Images
This last anecdote speaks to both the power of The Sound of Music and to why it’s been problematic for the country it portrays. Once our merry minivan band has dispersed (to the tune of ‘So Long, Farewell’, of course), I head back to Schloss Leopoldskron for my final appointment, with Peter Husty, director of Salzburg Museum. He explains how for Salzburgers, the film is by turns saccharine and bitter. ‘For instance they see it portraying everyone other than the Trapp family as Nazis – the telegram boy, the butler, anyone who remained after the Anschluss. This is one of the reasons why, if they do know the film, they’re not so in love with it.’ Husty is overseeing the creation of a new Sound of Music museum, which will be sited at Hellbrunn Palace, near the gazebo, and is due to open next year. One of its aims, clearly, is to draw some of the 300,000 annual Sound of Music pilgrims away from the tourist-saturated centre of Salzburg. But there is a wish, too, to better acquaint Salzburgers with the Von Trapp story. ‘The film is a little better known here since the musical was staged for the first time in the city in 2011; and it will be performed again later this year.’ The sense is that Salzburg may as well embrace its celluloid doppelganger. Sweeter than a sachertorte the film may be at times (Christopher Plummer called it The Sound of Mucus), but as Husty says, ‘We’re now in the third generation of people really engaged with the movie, and who have this romantic reaction to it. This feeling for it is always alive.’ Just like the hills, I want to say.
With thanks to Salzburg tourism.