| Submitted by: Mark R. LeeperUnited States |
| Submission Date: 10 February 2005 |
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The mansion and its gardens were beautiful and well- dedicated to conspicuous consumption as befitted the mistress of a father of the church. In 1818 the mansion burned but has been rebuilt if not actually restored. At one end of the garden is a court with four statues from Greek mythology that also represented the four elements. Air was represented by Hercules holding a giant in the air so he would not come in contact with the earth. Another showed Paris stealing Helen across the water. Another there was Aeneas fleeing from Troy in flames. Finally there is Pluto stealing Persephone to make the fourth statue.
From the palace we proceeded to the house Mozart was born in. It now has big letters out in front of the house labelling it as Mozart's Birthhouse. Mozart was born on January 27, 1756, which the guide seemed unaware was a Sunday. The guide warned us not to get our facts about Mozart from the film AMADEUS. In specific, Mozart died attended by one of Vienna's best physicians with his arms and legs swollen from rheumatic fever. That would have been pretty tough for Salieri to poison Mozart with. I claimed the film probably distorted Salieri's music for effect. In Mozart's time, when people knew his style of music, it still took an expert to realize Mozart's music was better than Salieri's. Today they really had to exaggerate the differences. I think I have even heard that it isn't even Salieri's music we hear. The guide also said Mozart could have fun but tended to be very serious. That is not how the film showed him.
In the old Salzburg of Mozart's time, garbage and waste was thrown into the street. Once a week a duct was opened and the streets would be flooded and flushed. Summer in Salzburg must have been a real hell-hole. No wonder Marias for years have escaped to the hills, more for fresh air than for the sound of music.
We visited two churches. One was Stiftskirche St. Peter. It was bombed during the war and reconstructed. Lots of paintings in the church, mostly on religious themes. The Cathedral is very cathedralesque with a large baptismal font that looks sort of like a pressure cooker. There is a thick lid covering the font with a handle to open a door in the lid. The local guide said the first church you love right away, the cathedral grows on you. I am not sure I loved either. Back in the square they were inflating three hot air balloons with advertising. Hours later they had not taken off. We ended the tour at the Mozart statue. There are a lot of representations of what Mozart looked like and no two agree. Artists of the day took license to make sure the guy who paid the bill looked good.
Back to the room to freshen up and then back to the fortress, the castle that overlooks the town. This fortress is the Hohensalzburg Fortress, four hundred feet about the city. It was started in 1077 and not completed until 1681. In 1521 the peasant farmers, tired of excessive taxes to build the structure, surrounded the fortress and asked for the taxes to be lessened. It seems they'd been listening to Martin Luther who, anxious to win disciples, told the peasants that it was his rules, not the laws, that counted. After all, wasn't it God's laws (which of course he could tell them), not man's, that counted? Luther, as I remember, thought that God's law was very favorable toward the Jews. That was when he expected that the Jews were going to come flocking to him because after all, they resisted the Catholics and so did he. When the hordes of Jewish disciples for some reason failed to materialize, Luther became one of the most rabid anti-Jewish bigots of his day. I guess from his point of view, God had just changed His mind about the Jews because they didn't follow the teachings of Luther. That must have meant God favored the teachings, right? Anyway, when the peasants started aiming Luther's arguments at the fortress, Matthaus Land von Wallenburg just sort of laughed them off. But as that great American philosopher Al Capone once said, 'You get better results with a kind word and a gun than you get with a kind word alone.' When the peasants started punctuating their arguments with cannon balls, Matthaus started seeing the logic and agreed to their points.
We took the guided tour which first takes you to a room with portraits of the masters of the fortress, then down to the torture chamber. Charles V legalized torture for all those little circumstances when nothing else would quite do. It was used for treason, witchcraft, and even crimes such as poaching.
The tour also included walks up to two towers that gave a great view of the Alps behind the castle and the surrounding valley. The same building houses the Burgmuseum, which shows the military history of the fortress up to the present, including World War II when it was used by the Nazis. We saw weapons, armor, torture implements, up to Nazi uniforms and guns. On your way out of the museum there is a slide show of sights of the fortress and its history narrated in Deutsch, of course, but it was pleasant to watch. After that we got pleasantly lost exploring the grounds of the fortress. Finally I figured out the layout--for once besting Evelyn, who was still lost. I told her how we could get to where we wanted to go.
We met Mary--who could not go into the fortress because of the stairs--and Steve--who left when we got to the museum. We took a few pictures and headed down to the catacombs, returning down the hill on the funicular.
I personally was a little disappointed in the catacombs, which one expects will be a tour of where the dead are laid. On the way in, conveniently placed, are the tombs of Nannerle Mozart (the sister of Wolfgang) and Michael Haydn (the brother of Joseph). I think they are contracting to get a cousin of Beethoven and a nephew of Brahms and put them at the entranceway also, but so far they have only the two. And those two are the only tombs you see. When you go into the catacombs, which is really climbing inside a hill, you really get to two chapels. One that dated back to the Third Century A.D. was a maimed cruciform shape built by overzealous Christian Romans. From the Third Century to 1669, the interior was in the shape of a cross. Then suddenly the laws of physics seemed to overrule God's protection and the left half of the crosspiece fell down the hill. This actually was God's way of saying that the idea of making the interior of a room in the shape of a cross was stupid and kitsch and has absolutely nothing to do with ethics. Ethics is what He is really concerned with, not seeing crosses everywhere you look, which since He sees all things He is getting pretty bored with. But while people were brighter then than now, they still thought God wanted much more emphasis on crosses everywhere than on ethics. I suspect that vast numbers of people spend more time thinking about and shopping for religious jewelry than they do thinking about ethical issues. (Speaking of religion and ethics, did you know that in Yugoslavia during World War II the Church openly sided with the Nazis! Now there must have been an interesting interpretation of Christ's teachings!)
On the way back to the hotel we looked for the Mozarteum, a school devoted to Mozart's music and which is supposed to have transplanted in the garden the house where Mozart wrote THE MAGIC FLUTE. We did find the Mozarteum and felt a little strange walking in, trying to find the garden. We never succeeded. On the way back we did see the Dwarf Garden of the Mirabell Palace, where there are about twelve statues of dwarves. Two or three had real personality.
After that we returned to our hotel. Evelyn immediately said she wanted to set out to find the synagogue that our guide said was in Lasserstrasse. That wasn't too far from our hotel. After a day of dragging around I was all in. This time I let Evelyn go by herself. Evelyn took the key and went. 'Wait a second,' I thought. 'She's gone where I have today. If she can make it, I can. Besides, am I going to let her see something in Europe I don't? Sure. The ladies washroom. But I want to keep that stuff to a minimum.' So I went out without a key, knowing if I didn't find her I'd be sitting in front of my room waiting for her to come back with our only key.
Luckily I found her reading the map in the lobby. Off we went in search of Lasserstrasse.
That wasn't too bad. But it is a longish street, maybe twelve blocks long. No sign of anything that looks like a synagogue. Finally we saw a building set back from the road. 'That's it,' I said. The building didn't look particularly Jewish. 'Do you know, or are you guessing?' Evelyn asked, staring at the building. 'I know. Look at the gates.' There was a U-shaped drive and on each of the two sets of gates was a six-pointed star. We got two or three shots, then headed back a different way. The rain started again. We got a little lost but found our way eventually.
Mojca had made reservations for us at a beer garden. Unfortunately it was in the old city part way up the road. The bus could get no nearer than a mile from the Stieglekeller, the beer garden. In the pouring rain this would not be much fun.
It was about twenty minutes walk with different people going at different rates and Mojca trying to keep the group together. The last one hundred yards were up a steep road. Mary was in a wheelchair. Steve ran up the hill pushing the chair. I ran up next to him holding the umbrella over the three of our heads. I was impressed. It was tough to keep up. But then, Steve's face got a lot redder than mine. A lot. Steve was pretty well soaked with rain. Actually, the problem was that earlier in the walk Mary was holding the umbrella for the two of them. She carefully kept it over Steve's head. She had to tip it back to do that because he was walking behind her. He sort of knew it was raining particularly hard on his back, but was not sure why. I pointed out to Mary that all the rain that hit the umbrella was rolling backwards and dripping onto Steve's back.
The beer garden turned out to be rather dead on such a rainy night. Mojca said it usually was pretty active but tonight there was just nothing happening. We were the most rambunctious group there. We had a soup called fritate that tasted like duck broth with noodles except they were really pancake of some sort sliced to noodle dimensions. This is supposed to be a dish available all over Austria. The main course was turkey in a curry-cream sauce. Obviously a dish that goes back to the Middle Ages! Dessert was yogurt cake, much like cheesecake. Sam complained there was not much to eat.
On the way out Evelyn talked to two tourists. They'd just come from Prague and said we'd love it. We'll see.
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We woke and went early to breakfast, then when Steve and Mary went down we went with them again, though just for a small bite. Steve was bemoaning having sent out his laundry and later realizing laundry was very expensive in Austria. By his estimate the bill was going to be more than $100. That is really being taken to the cleaners. Oddly, when he got his bill it was only $35, which was a great relief. It did not make mathematical sense, but it was a relief anyway.
My jinx was broken and we had a nice sunny day. Our first stop of the day was in Linz, home of the Linzer tart, I suppose. We were given an hour and a half to buy lunch for the road and do whatever sightseeing or shopping we wanted. Mojca did say there was a castle (or schloss) on the hill that we could visit. That was all we had to hear. Evelyn was off like a shot and I was behind her. Actually, I would have preferred having us buy what we needed first, but I wasn't given a vote.
The schloss is an old castle turned into a museum that would have cost money and taken more time than we had. |
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