I’m really enjoying my time here in Salzburg, and one of the great
advantages of my current mode of travel is that I can linger in the places I
love, as I’ve done here for the last few days.
One of many reasons I’ve been particularly enjoying Salzburg is because
the Salzburg Festival begins today and over the last few days I’ve been able to
hear some of the best opera singers in the world rehearsing throughout the
city. I’ll just be walking casually through a square and then a superb soprano
will float out of one of the upper windows of a building at the edge of the
square. Add to this the fact that I regularly see nuns, priests and monks
around the city, either on busses or cycling by, and I actually have to keep
pinching myself to be certain I’m not asleep, as it all seems too good to be
true.
Today I again had the benefit of my Salzburg card, and visited Mozart’s
birthplace and the place where he and his family lived for a number of years.
I’m terribly uneducated when it comes to classical music but that certainly
didn’t stop me appreciating the variety of ancient instruments on display, or
the incredible talent of this young genius, who died when he was just my age,
after writing a vast number of works.
Birthplace of a genius - the Mozarts lived in the apartment one storey up from the balcony where I took this picture when their son Wolfgang Amadeus was born. The window in the top left quadrant of this picture was once their kitchen window.
By then my Salzburg card had run out, but I particularly wanted to visit
the festival hall, which was the location for another famous scene from the
Sound of Music which we didn’t get to see on the tour – the stage carved out of
rock where the family performed before making their escape from Austria.
On the way over to the festival hall, I wandered by accident into a
crowd of very well-dressed people and some obvious dignitaries – the formal
opening of the Salzburg Festival had just concluded and they were all leaving
the festival hall. It was such fun to stand there and people watch for a while,
not least because I still can’t get over the fact that so many people wear
traditional dress, even to formal affairs. There doesn’t seem to be any
expectation or requirement that they do, and the crowd covered the spectrum
from full traditional dress to ordinary Western dress, with a range of
variations in between (women in dirndls with sky-high stilettos and huge
earrings, men with ordinary suit pants but an Austrian jacket (I’m sure that
has a proper name but I don’t know what it is), men with lederhosen but an
ordinary shirt and jacket). A bloke who I imagine was fairly high up in the
Church walked just past me, in a big hurry to get somewhere – he wasn’t in
cardinal red but he was certainly wearing some heavy-looking neck jewellery,
and if heavy-looking neck jewellery isn’t a sign of clerical prominence then I
don’t know what is.
Mixing the modern and the traditional.
(I'm going to split today's long post into a couple of shorter ones again - I don't want you, my treasured readers, to develop eye strain or kidney complaints as a result of having to sit through a single epic post. ;P)