SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
By Rob Harris
What in the World, a free weekly newsletter from our foreign correspondents, is sent every Thursday. Below is an excerpt. Sign up to get the whole newsletter delivered to your inbox.
Salzburg: Let’s start at the very beginning.
I first saw it as a child, sprawled on the carpet, eyes wide, heart open. I didn’t understand Nazis or nuns or Austria. I just knew it made me feel safe – and that singing seemed like a solution.
Julie Andrews as Maria didn’t just conquer the von Trapps in The Sound of Music, she conquered the world.Credit:
Now I’m in Salzburg’s Mirabell Gardens, standing on the Do-Re-Mi steps where TikTokers are filming themselves lip-syncing with exaggerated glee.
A teenage girl in glittery Crocs twirls in front of the Pegasus Fountain. A retiree from America conducts an imaginary orchestra. Off to the side, a pair of Korean women harmonise gently on My Favourite Things, competing with a Bluetooth speaker that’s slightly out of sync.
It’s chaos. It’s charming. It’s exactly what this city once tried hard to ignore.
Sixty years ago, The Sound of Music was met in Austria with a shrug. Too kitschy, too American, too far removed from the real Salzburg. Christopher Plummer, who played the stoic Captain von Trapp, famously dismissed it as “The Sound of Mucus”. But even he softened over time, later conceding that the film, which he once resented, had quite literally made him. Salzburg has had a similar reckoning.
For decades, the city’s elite winced as tourists arrived asking for the singing steps and “the house where Maria made clothes from curtains”. But embarrassment has long since turned to embrace – partly from affection, mostly from economics.
The film draws more than 350,000 tourists a year, pumping millions into hotels, bus tours, strudel stands and gift shops stocked with marionette goats. It’s estimated to contribute well over €1 billion ($1.8 billion) to the regional economy.
But the city’s conversion from reluctant star to musical mecca didn’t happen overnight. It has had to find a balance between preserving its baroque dignity and leaning into the twirling optimism that has defined it for generations of visitors.
Rob Harris at Salzburg’s Mirabell Gardens.Credit: Rob Harris
On a walking tour through the Old Town, I follow Igor, a whip-smart guide with a dry wit and a bottomless well of trivia. As we pass the fountain in Residenzplatz, where Maria sang I Have Confidence, he hits his stride.
“At this point,” he says, pausing for effect, “I must tell you something important. We do not eat schnitzel with noodles, this is not Austria.” He shrugs. “And please no French fries. You have it with erdapfelsalat [potato salad].”
Julie Andrews, who turns 90 this year, remains the brightest star to shine over Salzburg. Her Maria didn’t just conquer the von Trapps – she conquered the world.
Still, Salzburg isn’t only Maria’s city. Mozart, of course, still looms – his birthplace lovingly preserved, his likeness on everything from chocolates to shampoo. He may have composed more than 600 works and changed music forever, but in the battle for Salzburg’s most requested soundtrack, Edelweiss is giving Eine kleine Nachtmusik a real run.
On the Sound of Music official coach tour, our guide “Big Dave” – a gruff but rather camp Englishman – points to the Alps.
“Those mountains they climb at the end?” he says. “They lead to Germany, not Switzerland. You wouldn’t go that way.” He chuckles. “Not unless you were mad … or Maria.”
The group, a mix of Americans, Brits, Koreans, Australians and Indians, laughs in unison. One of them starts singing Sixteen Going on Seventeen. Another joins in. It’s off-key, unfiltered, unhinged and completely perfect.
We end up in Mondsee – a quaint, pastel-painted village a short drive from Salzburg, where the film’s iconic wedding scene was shot. The Basilica of St Michael, where Maria walked down the aisle in her satin gown, is every bit as grand in real life.
Local gift shops sell goat marionettes.Credit: Rob Harris
Across the square, I wander into a gift shop and give in completely. I buy a marionette goat – a nod to The Lonely Goatherd, obviously – a Julie Andrews postcard and an original copy of The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, Maria von Trapp’s autobiography. The book is more religious and rugged than the film, but somehow just as inspiring. The real Maria was steel wrapped in sincerity.
That afternoon, in Salzburg’s famed Marionette Theatre, I watch the entire story play out with tiny wooden figures. It shouldn’t work – and yet it does. There’s something fragile and beautiful about seeing strings lift these little characters skyward as they sing of confidence, courage and farewell.
The puppets take their final bow. I quietly wipe a tear.
The next day by the famous lake where Maria and the children fell out of the boat, I meet Peter Husty, chief curator at the Salzburg Museum.
Von Trapp family puppets at the Salzburg Marionette Theatre.Credit:
He tells me a new museum will open near Hellbrunn Palace next year, just steps from where the famous gazebo, in which Liesl and Rolf serenaded each other, now stands.
“There have been ideas for a museum for 25 years,” he says. “But we’re official and serious – we’re not a private, commercial thing. It’s not going to be an excuse for a gift shop.”
The museum aims to tell two stories: the Hollywood legend, and the Austrian reality.
“People come for Julie Andrews, but they often don’t know there was a real Maria von Trapp,” he explains. “The family’s story is a mirror of 20th-century Austrian history – monarchy, war, loss and emigration.”
Husty has spent years buying and begging from extensive private collections, including global film posters, soundtracks and rare memorabilia.
“We won’t make it a cinema – we’ll tell stories, show objects, backstage photos. It’s a cultural history.”
For Husty, the film’s impact is still striking.
“Every time I see a group rush to the gazebo, singing, I say it’s like a pilgrimage,” he laughs.
Aerial view of the historic city of Salzburg with Hohensalzburg Fortress in beautiful evening light in fall, Salzburger Land, Austria. Credit: iStock
When he curated the first local exhibition of the film in 2011, he even changed the carillon in Mozart Square to play Edelweiss. Tourists looked up, singing. Salzburgers called the museum asking, “What the hell is that music?”
And that, really, is the point. The Sound of Music has never been about historical accuracy. It’s about the refusal to be cynical. It believes that music can heal, that family can triumph, and that confidence can be sung into being.
Today, in a world spinning faster and more frantically than ever, The Sound of Music remains a gentle act of resistance. It reminds us that optimism isn’t naive. It’s necessary.
And Salzburg, after all these years, has come to understand that being the backdrop to a myth – even one dressed in curtain fabric – can be a privilege. Especially when that myth still makes people sing, weep and twirl.
As I leave, the bells of the cathedral ring out across the cobbled streets. I think of Julie. And I think maybe – just maybe – the beginning is still a very good place to start.
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
