Salzburg's Old Town skyline as seen from across the Salzach River. Photo / Unsplash
Home to Mozart, Salzburg is somewhat an overachiever. From stunning architecture to lavish desserts, this is a city built on perfection, writes Arundhati Hazra.
I have often wondered if I did my child a disservice by not playing Mozart to him since birth, given the supposed Mozart effect, which claims that playing classical music like Mozart to babies increases their cognitive abilities. It turns out that I needn’t have worried; Mozart has unknowingly landed among my toddler’s favourite songs. A young Mozart composed Twelve Variations on Ah vous dirai-je, Maman in 1785, using a melody based on an older French folk song, and the tune has been used in popular children’s rhymes such as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and The Alphabet Song.
This is just one of the many factoids about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that I learn in Salzburg, where Mozart was born in 1756 and lived until 1781. The composer is inescapable in Salzburg, where everything from chocolates to tea towels is emblazoned with his image. You can follow a Mozart trail around the town, or see a puppet show using his music at the Salzburg Marionette Theatre. The town even hosts a Mozart Week every year around the composer’s birthday in January, with concerts, operas and stage plays.
I arrive mid-morning in Salzburg on a train from Vienna, and head straight to the Salzburg Cathedral. Part of the Unesco World Heritage-listed Old Town of Salzburg, this church was founded in 774 but was destroyed a few times by fire, most recently during World War II, and the cathedral’s gates have the years of consecration in gilded numerals. The present Baroque appearance dates to the 17th century, made with Untersberg marble, with images of apostles and saints glaring down. The dome inside is a riot of frescoes and stucco embellishments, and the main organ, adorned with cherubs and golden trimmings, is magnificent.
There is a long queue for the funicular up to the medieval Hohensalzburg Fortress, that sits on top of the Festungsberg mountain just beyond the Old Town, so I wander around the cobbled streets instead. I stumble across a 12th-century water wheel that once powered a flour mill, near the St Peter’s Cemetery, a peaceful collection of tombs and colourful flowers, where Mozart’s sister, Maria Anna, and violin composer Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, are buried.
I also discover that not all the Old Town’s attractions are old. Between 2002 and 2010, the Salzburg Foundation invited contemporary artists from around the world to create public artworks, which resulted in the Walk of Modern Art, a collection of a dozen installations around the Old Town. The most prominent is Sphaera, of a man standing on a giant golden orb, in the Kapitelplatz square next to the cathedral, but there are also works by Anselm Kiefer, Marina Abramovic and Jaume Plensa waiting to be found.
All the walking makes me hungry, so I duck into St Peter’s Stiftskulinarium, Europe’s oldest restaurant. It began life as an abbey cellar in 803, before becoming a wine tavern in the Middle Ages and then a restaurant. Carved into the rock face of the Mönchsberg mountain, the restaurant puts together old wood carvings and royal coats of arms with contemporary paintings and furnishings in an eclectic way. The food is classic Austrian, and the Wiener schnitzel I order is large enough to feed two. I still make space for dessert: the local specialty called Salzburger Nockerl, a fluffy souffle with three peaks dusted with powdered sugar, for the three snow-capped mountains surrounding Salzburg.
To beat my food coma, I start walking again. I amble past Mozartplatz, which has a much-photographed statue of the composer, and head to Getreidegasse. One of the oldest shopping streets of Europe, the narrow street is known for its hanging guild signs of stags and boots and bells, which once denoted the trades of the local businesses. While they have now been co-opted by corporate firms from McDonald’s to H&M, spotting the signs amidst the modern brand logos, and guessing the original trades, is a fun exercise.
The star attraction of the street is Mozart’s Geburtshaus, a lemon-yellow building on Getreidegasse 9, where the composer was born. The Mozart family actually had two houses in Salzburg – Geburtshaus (meaning birthplace in German) and a larger Wohnhaus (residence), where they moved when they needed more space. Both are now museums documenting Mozart’s life and achievements. Learning that he composed his first music at the age of 5 and had performed before two imperial courts by the age of 6 can cause despondency to set in when you reflect on your unremarkable life, but I shove such thoughts away.
A hop, skip and jump away from the Geburtshaus is Cafe Tommaselli, Austria’s oldest coffee house dating back to 1700, and supposedly Mozart’s favourite cafe. The cafe is known for its lavish selection of pastries, from French gateaux to Austrian strudels. I don’t have space in my stomach for any more food, but I do try an Einspänner (espresso topped with whipped cream), an Austrian specialty.
Across the river from the Old Town is Salzburg’s other famous musical landmark, the Mirabell Palace, whose garden was a key location for the 1965 movie The Sound of Music. The palace grounds are filled with casual and diehard fans re-enacting scenes from the movie, and I admit that I also hummed the Do-Re-Mi ditty in front of the Pegasus fountain, which the von Trapp children danced around. The palace is known for its marble banquet hall decorated in white and gold, as well as the Baroque “angel’s staircase” studded with cherubs, but the gardens are a better bet on a sunny afternoon, from the manicured flower beds to the rose garden and orangery.
As dusk falls, a busker sets up on a street corner of the Old Town and begins to play Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on his violin. As I stand listening to him, I am reminded of Julie Andrews singing about the hills being alive with the sound of music. It is certainly an apt description for a town like Salzburg, with so many musical highlights to its name.
The writer travelled at their own expense.