11 minute read
the sound of Music
The Hollywood fi lm became a phenomenon that has made the city of Salzburg a pilgrimage destination for millions worldwide. Now, with The Sound of Music returning home for the fi rst time in a new musical production, Joanne O’Brien looks at the fi lm sets and the city on a Sound of Music tour
C. 20THC.FOX/EVERETT/REX FEATURES
Sight and sound 1. The cathedral at Mondsee where Maria and the Baron wed in the film 2. St Peter’s church where the family hidesww in the graveyard 3. Nonnberg Convent – where Maria was a nun 4. Mirabell Gardens – where Maria and the children sing Do-Re-Mi 5. The tour bus
Enter The Sound of Music into a Google search and you get 128,000,000 results. Astonishing for a 46-year-old Hollywood movie about a nun, set in Second World War Austria with a cast of largely unknowns, and children to boot. Yet such is the appeal of the fi lm worldwide to this day – and it’s growing – that it is one of the major reasons visitors head for Salzburg, only trumped by Mozart and the Salzburg Festival of music.
Not bad for a low-budget fi lm with six weeks of location fi lming, which overran to 11.
Each year it is estimated that more than 300,000 visitors head to Salzburg purely because of the fi lm, and around 50,000 of them embark on a Sound of Music tour. Each day, fans and other visitors are to be found gathering by the kiosk along the Rainerstraße between St Andrew’s church and
Mirabell Gardens in the centre of Salzburg, for a four-hour extravaganza of singing the songs and seeing the sights so familiar to millions from the 20th Century Fox fi lm which won fi ve Oscars. The tour, one of several on off er in the city and one of the oldest, takes visitors from Mirabell and its 18th century baroque gardens and the Pegasus fountain, where the children run around and sing Do-Re-Mi and afterwards run up the steps to the rose hill, through and out of the city and into the countryside to see the locations which have given Salzburg an unexpected tourism goldmine.
Outside the church, on one of the hottest days of the year, I meet New Zealanders Marina and Richard Taylor and Marina’s sister Sarah Paea. Richard, says his wife,
‘didn’t want to come’. The women have come in part as a tribute to their mother, who died recently, and like them loved The Sound of Music. They came last year and, back home, get a regular fi x of the fi lm via DVD; pausing it at signifi cant moments to bring up photographs they took of venues on their trip.
The coach is air-conditioned and on board are cold beers and soft drinks, including the refreshing Almdudler (‘Alpine yodeller’) the national drink that’s a cross between ginger beer and lemonade. There’s also a coff ee and snack stand at the bus departure point, and we’re told we’ll have a stop-off for refreshments during the tour.
By the time we depart, the 48-seater coach is full. A cheer goes up when Naomi, our English-speaking tour guide,
welcomes us to ‘the one and only Sound of Music tour!’ Naomi, born in the UK but brought up in Austria, brings the history of the city alive as she links it in with the fi lming in 1965 and the stories associated with the production. As we settle into our seats she informs us that ‘This is a singalong bus!’ and the fi rst of the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II numbers fi lls the coach – appropriately, as we’re starting at the very beginning, the jolly Do-Re-Mi.
As we head through the city, Naomi points out a pale- pink building (all Austrian buildings are painted prettily, it seems). This is the Marionette theatre, where Julie Andrews’ character Maria and the children in the fi lm learned how to work the puppets for their show to entertain their stern father. Today, the Salzburger Marionettentheater off ers performances of The Sound of Music alongside Strauss’s Die Fledermaus and Mozart’s The Magic Flute.
Each landmark from the fi lm is marked on our coach trip by its relevant song from the fi lm. For The Lonely Goatherd, we’re instructed in how to yodel. My fellow passengers, a mixture of ages but mostly younger, with couples, groups of friends, babies in buggies and some older children, take a bit of warming up with the singing. Naomi also points out locations that weren’t in the fi lm but involved with the fi lming, such as the elegant Hotel Bristol, where Christopher Plummer ‘ran up a bar bill that was legendary!’ Other anecdotes include the child actors being bored while the grown-ups are partying and swapping all the shoes left for cleaning outside guests’ doors with those on diff erent fl oors.
In Cathedral Square we note where Maria, the novice nun, boarded her bus for the journey to meet her new employer, the Captain, and the children for whom she’d be governess. The vast yellow-coloured Nonnberg Convent, in Salzburg’s Altstadt or Old City, where Maria in the fi lm and the real-life Maria Augusta von Kutschera were novices, is high on a hill overlooking the river. As with many of the locations, no fi lming was actually done inside there, but either in a studio on location in Salzburg, or back in the US on the 20th Century Fox lot.
As with most fi lms there is a certain amount of poetic licence with the Hollywood story. The gist of the real story was that Baron Georg von Trapp, the Austrian Navy’s most successful submarine commander, married Agathe Whitehead, whose father invented the submarine torpedo, in 1927. They had fi ve children, Agathe died (of rheumatic fever), circumstances prompted a move to Salzburg from the Vienna area and the motherless children were put into the daily care of an inexperienced governess who was fi nding it hard to fi t in as a young novice in the disciplined world of the local convent. The Baron and the governess, Maria, ended up marrying and had two more children. The family took up singing under the guidance of a local priest, started winning competitions, and as The Trapp Family Singers won fi rst prize at the 1935 Salzburg Festival. They used their singing fame to help them emigrate to the US when Hitler annexed Austria. For the fi lm’s purposes, distances are changed and locations are substituted. For example, when the family is crossing the mountains (cue Climb Every Mountain) at the end of the fi lm to go to Switzerland to fl ee the Nazis, Salzburg’s ‘home’ mountain of Untersberg actually stands in for Switzerland. And they would actually have been going straight into Germany, in real life! On the fl anks of the mountain were also fi lmed the opening scenes of the fi lm to the strains of The Hills are Alive.
The eyecatching little Art Nouveau Mozart Bridge or Mozartsteg, across the city’s Salzach River, has the claim to fame of the children walking across it on the way to their picnic, having stopped to dress in their cut-up fl owery curtains, courtesy of Maria and her sewing skills.
We head out of the city, passing pretty painted houses with fl ower-bedecked balconies, and soon arrive at the Leopoldskron Palace, used as the von Trapp villa in the movie. Although the façade facing the lake was used in shots, all the terrace scenes including the memorable moment where the children fell out of the boat and into the lake, were shot in an adjacent property. You can actually stay in the beautiful rococo palace today, with its stunning views over the lake to the mountains. One-time owner of the palace was Max Reinhardt, the founder of the Salzburg festival.
There’s a pretty café, and many tourists stop for a stroll along the lakeside and to take photographs. It’s peaceful and romantic, too, and was the setting for two of the fi lm’s main love scenes, in particular the one between eldest daughter Maria and her soldier beau Rolf in the glass gazebo. Originally situated here, only the exterior was used in the fi lm, with the interior shots taken back in Hollywood. The gazebo can now be seen in the beautiful Hellbrunn Palace park, just outside the city. It isn’t open to the public any more as fans of a certain age presented health and safety issues when they tried to dance from one to the other of the benches inside! But you can pose outside for photographs. Here, we also stop to look down the tree-lined avenue where Maria sang I’ve Got Confi dence…
Further out into the countryside and there’s a timeless quality about the landscape, with its lush green meadows, undulating fi elds of wild fl owers, improbably blue lakes and russet-coloured cows.
At the pretty town of Mondsee, we are mesmerized by the stunning Moon Lake of its name, whose usual dark blue or dark green depths are given a milky appearance after a shower, with the chalk from the limestone Alps stirred up by the rain. We stop for coff ee and delicious light Esterhazy cakes and the chance to see inside the glorious Collegiate church of St Michael, where Maria
Clockwise from top left: the unicorn statue at the Mirabell Gardens which the children dance around; the Mirabell Gardens; the Summer Riding School where Edelweiss is sung; the Untersberg mountain where they sing Climb Every Mountain; the gazebo in Hellbrunn Palace gardens where Liesl and Rolf sing a duet
and the Baron married in the film (much grander than the church where they wed in the real-life story).
We head back to the coach and the dirndl-wearing, irrepressible, governess-like Naomi, who at all times has impressed upon us getting back to the coach on time so that she won’t have to worry about anyone being left behind and interfering with the four-hour packed schedule. On warning us that it’s a long walk back to Salzburg from Mondsee, she asks, smiling: ‘Do you know the difference between a passenger and a pedestrian? Two minutes!’
We head back to Salzburg, admiring the traditional wooden houses and balconies decked out in bright pink and scarlet pelargoniums and typical of the Salzkammergut lakes region. We’re all happily refreshed but quieter now, and the songs are swapped for a Sound of Music documentary on the coach tv screen, with lots of interesting background information about the making of the film, introduced and voiced by the actress who played Liesl.
At one point our guide asks if anyone on the coach has never seen The Sound of Music. A farmer from Northern Ireland, whose solicitor girlfriend says she loves the film, puts up his hand. The rest of us are in shock. An Indian family talk about how it’s on television there every year at Diwali. A Canadian family of two generations talk about how it has always been part of their lives. We are a friendly bunch, with a feel-good film in common, and everyone takes the trouble to say goodbye to fellow Sound of Music tourists as we’re dropped off the coach back at Mirabell gardens, after a rousing singalong of The Cuckoo Song and a more poignant So Long, Farewell… Naomi presents each of us with a parting gift of a packet of Edelweiss seeds. I ask one of my fellow passengers, a girl who tells me she’s nine (so born when the film was already more than 30 years old), what she enjoyed most. ‘Everything’, she sighs.
I wouldn’t have called myself a fan of the film before this, but now I can’t wait to get the DVD, pause the scenes and compare it with my photos. ■
Make a note
Another treat for children not to miss is a matinee at the enchanting Salzburger Marionettentheater which stages wonderful puppet versions of leading operas. Contact: +43 (0) 662 872406, www.marionetten.at Tickets €18 to €35
A home premiere
Sound of Music lovers from around the world will head for Salzburg in autumn 2011 for the premiere of the musical, finally, in its home city. Originally a book, the memoirs of Maria Augusta von Trapp in The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, the first theatrical production was in 1959 on Broadway, with music by Richard Rodgers and the libretto by Oscar Hammerstein II. New York saw around 2,000 performances, London 2,400, and on October 23, 2011 Salzburg, where the Sound of Music is set and where much of it was filmed on location, is finally hosting the production at the city’s Landestheater.
Although it did play in Germanspeaking countries in the Germandubbed version called Meine Lieder, Meine Träume (‘My Songs, My Dreams’), the film and the worldwide fuss and excitement it has caused have largely gone unknown and ignored in Austrian popular culture until now.
The basic ticket price is €40, but special ticket packages include a guided backstage tour for €65; and, for €100 visitors get the backstage tour, have their photograph taken with the performers, a glass of sparkling wine, a ‘sweet surprise’ and a Sound of Music giveaway. You can even organise a private Sound of Music performance, taking over the entire 680-seat theatre. ■ Bookings on gruppen@
salzburger-landestheater.at
■ Further information about the
theatre: www.salzburger-landestheater.at or www.salzburg.info
Further inFormation
For more info on The Sound of Music, go to: www.salzburg.info or www.SalzburgerLand.com • Salzburg Panorama tours, daily at 9.30am and 2pm, lasting four hours. Email: sightseeing@panoramatours.at www.panoramatours.at
