My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Chapter 11: Salzburg

 

View of Salzburg from the Hohensalzburg Fortress (see also photo below)

Our next (and last) stop in Austria was Salzburg, most notable as the city where Mozart was born in 1756.

Salzburg was founded in 696 CE.  Situated on the Salzach River, the town's main sources of revenue in medieval times were salt extraction, gold mining, and tolls on commerce along the river.  Like Innsbruck and most of Austria, over the centuries into the 20th century Salzburg was a geo-political and religious "football."

The most prominent landmark is the Hohensalzburg fortress, a medieval fort that was begun in 1077 and expanded and reinforced many times during the next 800 years.  It towers 269 feet above the city.  It was retired as a military outpost in 1861 and was refurbished to become a major tourist attraction in the late 1800s.  The fortress is the building on the mountain over my left shoulder in the photo below.

The city has a long, rich cultural, religious, musical, and architectural history, and the Old Town became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996.  Notwithstanding those cultural riches, however, my interest was driven (as it was in Innsbruck) by a more contemporary phenomenon:  the 1965 movie The Sound of Music, much of which was filmed in Salzburg.

Today there are many tour companies offering Sound of Music location tours in and around Salzburg. 

But in 1966, I had to roll my own . . . from memory.  Here are a couple of the locations in the movie and my photos of them.

The Horse Fountain

Salzburg's most famous horse fountain is the Pferdeschwemme (Horse Pond) on Herbert-von-Karajan-Platz (which wasn't that name when we were there), a historic 17th-century Baroque pool where the prince-archbishops' parade horses were washed.

Scene from the movie
(Julie Andrews and children walking R to L in front of the horse statue)

St. Peter's Cemetery

At the foot of the mountain on which the Hohensalzburg fortress is situated is St. Peter's Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in Salzburg, dating from the 700s.  The oldest grave marker is dated 1288.  Among other city notables, Mozart's older sister, Maria Anna, is buried in the cemetery (1829).

In the movie, the von Trapp family hides in the cemetery as they make their escape from Austria.

Scene from the movie

Ironically, 20th Century Fox could not get permission to film in the cemetery, so they built an exact replica in a Hollywood soundstage where they shot the scene shown above.

The Do-Re-Mi Steps (Mirabell Gardens at the Mirabell Palace)

The Mirabell Palace was built in 1606-07 (when the British were settling Jamestown in North America), and the gardens were laid out 80 years later.  The Palace's current neoclassical appearance dates from around 1818, when the Palace was restored after a fire.

Interesting fact:  three days before D-Day (June 6, 1944) Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and Martin Borman attended the wedding of Eva Braun's sister to Himmler's liaison officer on Hitler's staff at the Mirabell Palace.

Mirabell Gardens
with the Hohensalzburg Fortress in the distance

In the movie, the final 52 seconds of the production number of the song "Do-Re-Mi" occur in the Mirabell Gardens, adjacent to the Palace.

You can watch the 3-minute finale here.  If you don't want to watch the whole thing, just scrub to 2:08 for the garden sequence -- it's fun.

Enjoy!

My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Chapter 10: Innsbruck

 

After visiting Oberammergau and Linderhof Palace, we retraced our route back into Austria for a stop in Innsbruck.

The city is the capital of the Austrian state of Tyrol, and its history goes way back to the Middle Ages.  It was a strategic crossing point for the Inn River on the trade route from northern Italy (Verona) to Germany (Augsburg) over the Brenner Pass . . . the route we took from Venice.  

Tyrol, including Innsbruck, has been a geo-political football for centuries.  It became part of Bavaria during the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century, but was restored to Austria in 1814.  Then in 1938 Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and the Nazis established two subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp (outside of Munich - about which, more in a later post) in Innsbruck to house high-profile political prisoners and their families from 16 countries as hostages during  WWII.  Between 1943 and April 1945, Innsbruck experienced twenty-two air raids and suffered heavy damage.

Many of the city's historic buildings survived the Allied bombing, including the Goldenes Dachl (Golden Roof), considered the city's most famous symbol, which was completed in 1500 and decorated with 2,657 fire-gilded copper tiles to commemorate the third marriage of Emperor Maximilian I which occurred in 1494:

 . . . and right across the street, the Helblinghaus, built in the 1400s with Rococo stucco decorations added in the early 1700s:

The Stadtturm (City Tower), built in 1450:

. . . and the St. Anne's Column, built in 1706 to commemorate the withdrawal of Bavarian troops from the Tyrol region during the War of the Spanish Succession -- another one of those geo-political football periods for Tyrol and Innsbruck:

Uppermost in my mind, however, were not the architectural landmarks nor the geo-political history.  For me, the attraction was the Winter Olympics held in Innsbruck two years earlier.  They were the third Winter Olympics to be televised internationally, and being a child of the Golden Age of Television, I was culturally conditioned to ascribe value to things depicted on TV:  if something -- or some place -- had been on TV or in the movies, then it must be important.

So I was most interested in the structures and symbols of the Innsbruck Olympics, the most dramatic of which was the Olympic cauldron at the Bergisel ski jump stadium, where the Olympic flame burned throughout the games.

Here's the stadium and ski jump itself:

And here's what the skier sees when he/she leaps from the take-off table at the end of the ramp into the air going 60 mph:

Pretty awesome view, eh?  But what you might not notice is what's visible just beyond the stadium, here:

If you look closely, you can see it's a cemetery next to a cathedral!

I think I'd rather go for a run.

My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Chapter 9: Oberammergau and Linderhof Palace

 

From Venice, we doubled back west then turned north to Trento and Bolzano heading for Innsbruck, Austria.  This route took us from sea level in Venice, then through the Italian Alps over the Brenner Pass (elevation 4,490 ft.), and we hoped that our recently-repaired Morris minivan would make it.  It did, without incident.

We had plotted a little side trip to visit two interesting places in southeast West Germany (Bavaria) -- Oberammergau and Linderhof Palace --  about 50 miles north of Innsbruck, so we had to go through Innsbruck to get there.  I'll talk about Innsbruck in my next post; here I talk about our side trip destinations.

Oberammergau

Being good -- but young, naive -- Christians at the time, we wanted to visit the site of the decennial Oberammergau Passion Play depicting events from the life of Jesus.  Our interest was also partially motivated by the fact that in the Wichita Mountains near Lawton, Oklahoma (Bill's and my home town) an annual passion play (known as the "Easter Pageant") has been performed every Easter by local cast and crew at the Holy City of the Wichitas.  Begun in 1926, it's the longest continuously performed passion play in North America.

Holy City of the Wichitas
Photo by Larry Smith via Wikimedia Commons

The Oberammergau Passion Play began much earlier . . . in 1634.  Legend has it -- but history doesn't actually confirm -- that after half of the town's population died from the bubonic plague, the remaining townspeople asked God to spare them from the plague and vowed to perform a passion play every ten years depicting the life and death of Jesus.  Again according to legend, after that vow, no townspeople died from the plague.

The play was performed every ten years from 1634 to 1674, and thereafter every decadal year since 1680.  Throughout the centuries, there have been several cancellations (primarily due to European wars and, most recently, the Covid-19 pandemic) and a few off-cycle performances to commemorate the 300th and 350th anniversaries of the play.

When we visited Oberammergau, we were naively unaware of the antisemitic elements of the play, which, after the defeat of Germany in World War II, came under increasing pressure from American Jews.  In 1950, playwright Arthur Miller and composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein led a petition to cancel the play, but the townspeople restaged the 1934 (300th anniversary) version of the play which Hitler had attended.  Controversy and revisions to rid the play of anti-Jewish tropes continue to this day.

The theater we visited in 1966 was built in the 1890s and hosted its first performance of the play in 1900.  You can't tell from the photo below, but the theater is huge!  It can accommodate 4,700 people in the audience and hundreds on stage.

To give you a better sense of the scale, here's what it looks like with an audience:

Photo: Andreas Praefcke
via Wikimedia Commons

After touring the theater, I lagged behind the group to get the first photograph above and got locked in -- a classic photographer move!  It took a few minutes before they noticed I was missing and unlocked the exit to liberate me.

Linderhof Palace and the Mysterious Death of King Ludwig II of Bavaria

About 15 miles from Oberammergau is Linderhof Palace, the smallest of three palaces built in the late 1800s by King Ludwig II of Bavaria.  Outside Germany Ludwig II is sometimes referred to as the Mad King, a term we had heard, but we didn't know why he was called that.  It's due to the circumstances of his deposition and mysterious death -- about which, more below.

In Bavaria during his lifetime, however, he was known as the Swan King or the Fairy Tale King, due to his extravagant devotion to music, theatre, and palaces.  Linderhof was the only castle that was actually completed in his lifetime.  He lived in it from 1876 until his death in 1886 at age 40.

The most famous of Ludwig's three palaces is, of course, the iconic Neuschwanstein Castle, which appears in travel posters for Germany, as well as on German currency and postage stamps, and it served as the inspiration for Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty castle.  Neuschwanstein was a bit too far out of our itinerary, so we had to settle for Linderhof.

Neuschwanstein Castle
Photo by Thomas Wolf
via Wikimedia Commons

When you hear the term "the Mad King," you may imagine some 18th century king with a powdered white wig, waving his hands and yelling at people . . . something like this:

But Ludwig II of Bavaria was a young, late 19th century monarch, who stood 6' 4" and looked like this:

Photo by Joseph Albert
Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Photographer unknown

He ascended to the throne in 1864, when he was 18.  Two years later, Bavaria and its allies came under Prussian hegemony when they were defeated in the Austro-Prussian war, and in 1871 Bavaria became part of the German Empire.  Ludwig increasingly withdrew from day-to-day affairs of state, in favor of extravagant artistic and architectural projects (e.g., Linderhof, Neuschwanstein, and others).

Ludwig was also an enthusiastic patron of composer Richard Wagner.  Wagner had a notorious reputation as a political radical and philanderer who was constantly on the run from creditors.  Ludwig was likely the savior of Wagner's career; without Ludwig, Wagner's later operas are unlikely to have been composed, much less premiered at the prestigious Munich Royal Court Theatre, which went on to become the Bavarian State Opera.

At the time of our visit to Linderhof, we knew a little about Ludwig's connections to Wagner.  But we didn't know anything of his sexuality; he was probably gay.  He had close male friends as an adolescent, and other close male relationships as an adult.  On becoming king, he was under pressure to produce an heir and in 1867 became engaged to his 19-year-old cousin.  Nine months later, after multiple postponements of the wedding, he cancelled the engagement.  According to the biography in Wikipedia, 

Ludwig never married nor had any known mistresses. His diary, private letters, and other documents reveal his strong homosexual desires, which he struggled to suppress to remain true to the teachings of the Catholic Church.

We toured the grounds and interior of the palace, but I only took two pictures of the exterior.  The day we were there, there was a boys choir that performed on the steps.

Ludwig spent all his own private royal revenues (although not state funds as is commonly thought) on Linderhof and other projects.  But he borrowed extensively and defied all attempts by his ministers to restrain him.  When his castle-building caused the virtual bankruptcy of the Bavarian state, his ministers accused him of insanity, deposed him on grounds of mental illness -- hence, "the Mad King" -- and had him committed to custody at Lake Starnberg castle, about 50 miles away from Linderhof and closer to Munich. 

The day after his imprisonment, Ludwig disappeared while out for a walk with his physician.  His corpse was discovered a few hours later, along with the corpse of his physician.  The death was officially declared to be suicide by drowning, but the circumstances of his death remain open to question.  Ludwig was a strong swimmer; the water was less than waist-deep where his body was found; and there was no water found in his lungs at the autopsy.  Nor does the suicide theory explain the mysterious death of his physician the same day. 

Shortly after his death, Ludwig's castles were opened to the public as museums. Today, Ludwig II's architectural and artistic legacy includes many of Bavaria's most important tourist attractions.  Linderhof Palace is one of them.

Next post:  Innsbruck