The Hills Have Lives

The Mirabel Gardens, Salzburg Cathedral, and the Festung

One of the least unique things about Laura and I as a couple is our feeling about The Sound of Music. She likes it, and I don't. Granted, I haven't seen it in 10 years, so maybe I will find new things about it that my more mature cinematic self can dislike.

But I'm betting that none of those things, new or old, will be the scenery. We decided to stretch our German Railpass to the limit, and actually took a train all the way to Salzburg, just across the Austrian border. We were lucky to catch another beautiful day, and Salzburg is a nice place to catch beautiful days. If you happen to be an unmarried male, you may not know that Salzburg is the setting for The Sound of Music, but I'm guessing everyone else knew already (my mom has confessed to me that she took German in college for the express purpose of one day going to Austria to become more like Julie Andrews).

Nuns, but no Sister Maria

But beyond all that Von Trapp yodeling, there's quite a bit to Salzburg. Granted, we started with the Mirabell Gardens, and we had to wait in line behind several skipping couples until we could get a free shot at the infamous archway of foliage.

Jumping instead of skipping

You might think that I as a connoisseur of music history would be interested in Salzburg because it was Mozart's birthplace. Interesting, true, but not enough so to shell out €10 to tour his old house. To the extent that child geniuses exist at all, I think Mendelssohn was as good if not a better example of it than Mozart, who was trained like a machine from birth. And Mozart wasn't actually that fond of Salzburg, although the city makes lots of tourist money off of him today. The coolest musical thing I saw there was the cathedral, which is huge and old like many European cathedrals, but also has four separate organs flanking its sanctuary (which, the acoustician in me would like to point out, would be hard to keep together if they were all playing since they all face away from each other and the reverberation time must be at least 5 seconds) which look pretty intimidating.

Laura looking prim and proper

But the most worthwhile thing in Salzburg, at least by my estimate, is the huge fortress ('Festung') on the hill in the middle of the city. It claims to be Europe's largest fortification, "possibly the most beautiful," whatever that means. Yes, it costs some money to get in, but it costs less if you climb the hill yourself rather than paying for a lift, which makes you feel better about paying to get in because you've already saved so much money.

The hills are alive - that's probably why they built the Festung

What's so cool about the Festung, you ask? Well, for one thing it's huge, imposing, and has a great view of the beautiful valley, river, and hills. You really need to climb to the very top of this one and catch the breeze on a sunny day - okay, I admit I may have burst into "The Hills Are Alive..." once or twice, but I don't know any more than the first line (when I was a kid, we used to sing it as "The Hills Are Alive and They're Gonna Eat You!") or so.

In addition, the Festung has a golden hall whence the archbishop ruled, and it's made of ornate wood and gold overlay - like Medusil in The Two Towers. Maybe I've exposed too much of my innate nerdiness in this post already, but a good appreciation for Tolkien and epic fantasy will go a long way toward an appreciation of European history - lots of majestic buildings, vistas, and weapons of death. The Festung also has a museum of medieval weapons which is a bit grisly but informative.

Braxton gets corrupted by sheer power in the Golden Hall

All in all, a city that lives up to its hype - don't come here for Mozart, come here for Salzburg. 7.5/10.0

Pilgrimage to Leipzig

Anticipating that the day after Dachau might be something of a downer, we had decided to go to Leipzig, city of light and music, for a pick-me-up. Actually, the ‘light’ part was in doubt at first – our entire weather forecast for the week was somewhat inaccurate. We went to Dachau on what was supposed to be a gray, gloomy day, but it actually turned out to be very pretty (not that we felt much better as a result). The next day in Leipzig was supposed to be sunshiny, to hopefully raise our spirits and make us feel better about the human race (yes, I do tend to script my life like scenes in a movie). This prediction was looking equally dubious, as we rode a train through four hours of rain and clouds. But as we left the train station, the clouds were beginning to break, and it ended up being the beautiful day we’d hoped for, although we never would have appreciated it as much if it had happened the way I’d scripted it in my head (or maybe that’s just the post-production editor in me, trying to insert morals into events that don’t need them).

Leipzig is mainly known for its connections to Western music through the composers who spent many years of their lives here. There were too many such composers for us to do justice to them all in one daytrip, so we had to prioritize. After a quick, failed attempt to find RichardWagnerplatz (which I swear was on the map but sadly did not seem to have a correlate in reality), we went to the house of the composer who is more associated with Leipzig and whose legacy left the city pilgrimage-worthy in the first place: J.S. Bach.

Laura in the Thomaskirche

Despite being a huge name in classical music today, Bach led a pretty low-key lifestyle throughout his compositional career. It was only the Baroque period, and composers had not achieved the international rockstar status that would later be associated with Mozart or Liszt. After several years in Weimar and Cöthen, Bach accepted a position as Cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where he would spend the remaining 27 years of his life. While there, he enjoyed a prolific career, writing, rehearsing, and accompanying one cantata per week, as well as churning out a couple of little Bachs who would become pretty well known composers during the Classical period.

Jumping by the Bach statue

Much like every other tourist attraction you’d like to see in Western Europe, the Bach museum was undergoing renovations and only had a small portion of its exhibits up, with no English translation available. But we did get to spend a lot of time in the Thomaskirche, which was one of the main things I wanted to see while in Europe. Bach’s immense faith and compositional impact, all while serving on a relatively small scale to a local congregation, have always been an encouragement to me. But the fact remains that later composers and audiences would not have been inspired by Bach or even known who he was had it not been for the diligent musicological efforts of the next guy whose house we would visit, Felix Mendelssohn.

You see, the classical music world in Mendelssohn’s day was sort of the opposite of ours – while we are trapped in the past, making the same tired overtures to a relatively small cabal of dead Europeans, the musical programs of Mendelssohn’s day were solely focused on the present, a relatively small cabal of live Europeans. Tastes had changed with the times, and Baroque music was ignored and forgotten. Despite Bach’s paradigm-changing mastery of counterpoint, chromaticism, and fugue, audiences 80 years later preferred to listen to the cookie-cutter classical garbage emanating from any number of no-name halfwits who are today completely forgotten. But Mendelssohn, who had risen from a child prodigy (better than Mozart, according to Goethe) to one of the premier composers of his day, also took a strong interest in staging the works of master composers long deceased. It was through Mendelssohn’s efforts staging Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Berlin that ignited later generations' interest in Bach's music.

Mendelssohn looking oddly diagonal

Mendelssohn is my idol in many respects – he was a polymath, also creating numerous drawings, watercolors, and paintings, some of which are displayed in his house. He also spearheaded music education by founding the Leipzig Conservatory. He was friends with Liszt and the Schumanns, and they hung out at each other’s houses. He had a recital hall in his house, where friends and family would periodically perform new pieces they were working on. If I were to be displaced to any place and period in history, it would probably be late 18th Century Leipzig.

That being said, Leipzig is still very nice even if you’re not crazy about history. The University is quite modern in some parts, including a space-age tower that looks a bit like an open book or a wisdom tooth, depending on your perspective. The city has many beautiful open squares with fountains (a must for any old European city), very good street musicians, (though not as transcendent as Prague’s), and, according to Laura, really incredible hot dogs.

Final rating: 7.0/10.0