Salzburg is so ridiculously pretty, it’s sometimes hard to take it seriously. Standing on the ramparts of its knights-in-armour castle, surrounded by snowcapped mountains, admiring the delicate cluster of domes and spires and turrets below, you can’t help thinking, ‘Is this for real?’ Well, yes and no. Salzburg is absurdly beautiful — the baroque architecture, the Alpine scenery — but what’s most intriguing is its sense of theatre, the way it’s adapted to fit the fantasies of millions of foreign visitors like me.
Salzburg’s biggest draw is Mozart — a wunderkind who personifies the city’s clever blend of fact and fiction. Yes, he grew up here and left his footprints all over town — from the robust house where he was born, now an atmospheric museum, to the ornate church where he worshipped, where you can hear his haunting Requiem. His pensive face stares out from the window of every souvenir shop as you tramp the alleys of the Altstadt, worn smooth by generations of sightseers. You’d never guess he was (literally) kicked out of his day job, as organ master to Salzburg’s archbishop (or ‘arch-oaf’ as Mozart called him) and wrote his greatest hits in Vienna.
It took Salzburg quite a while to wake up to Mozart’s marketing potential (the statue on Mozartplatz was finally erected more than 50 years after he died) but since then it’s been busy making up for lost time. Now his image adorns every conceivable tourist knickknack — even the airport bears his name. It’s richly ironic, considering Salzburg treated him like a lowly servant when he lived here. No wonder he couldn’t wait to leave.
Another musical phenomenon which took Salzburg by surprise was The Sound of Music. The film flopped in Austria and remained virtually unknown here until the coach parties started coming.
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