Once More in Triple Time

In fact, I had been to Salzburg once before, decades earlier, as a high school student. We had taken the train from Munich, where maybe 15 of us were staying in a little hotel near the Hauptbahnhof, supervised by one of our school’s two German teachers, Frau Bell. The trip was an exercise in cultural immersion, the value of which, like that of learning another language, was apparently self-evident enough that I can’t remember questioning it until I was throwing up the convenience-store pizza I had ordered in German. Frau Bell assumed I’d been drinking.

No doubt she offered insight and instruction along the way, but my enduring memory of her is the disappointment that crossed her face when, waiting for the train that would take us to Dachau, a few of us posed irreverently with candy cigarettes. It was winter then, and I remember standing in front of the elaborate fountain outside the Salzburg Cathedral, mugging for more photos in the bitter cold. We skipped the funicular, which may have been closed for the season, and walked the steep, winding path to the hilltop fortress. The day was cloudy, and the otherwise dramatic views were obscured in every direction. The Alps were invisible, and still somehow they loomed. A sharp wind lashed the hillside, penetrating our parkas.

This time around, it was August, and the streets were jammed with tourists and concertgoers attending the Salzburg Festival. Everywhere I turned, Mozart was streaming from some hidden speaker. I didn’t understand all those years ago why we had come to Salzburg, but climbing the footpath to the fortress a second time, I saw what Frau Bell must have wanted us to see: a beautiful city wedged between hills, a river running between them, rolling plains in one direction, mountains in the other. Atop the walls of the fortress, plein-air painters worked at their easels. The Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard, noted for his polemical criticisms of his country, called Salzburg a cretinous, provincial dump, but the way the painters lovingly rendered the domes and crags and cupolas made it clear that his opinion is not universally held.

I was staying in a 500-year-old building, but my room had been renovated to look like a corporate hotel along a highway. Only the casements, opening onto the baroque façade of the opposite building, retained an air of the hotel’s past. All day below my window, children played in a kind of fountain that carried brightly colored plastic balls from one end of the sloping block to the other. Near the spot where the balls collected, a middle-aged man played Mozart on the goblets of a glass harp. Every now and then, a few notes from the Piano Concerto No. 21 would drift into my room.

The city’s wealth had originally grown from the salt mined in the region—hence the name (Salz meaning “salt”)—and with the earnings from their white gold, the prince-archbishops of the city-state built lavishly and defensively in an architecture of absolute power. Across the river from my hotel, for instance, stood the cathedral-cum-palace, now a living museum, preserved (like so much of the city) with spectacle in mind. A 17th-century visitor might recognize much of the cityscape, but the experience would still be surreal. Imagine returning home one night to find that your house had become a gift shop. And yet without those souvenirs, without the simulation of memory, the old fortresses would have long since crumbled into ruin. The hotel was comfy enough, but could you really say it had been saved?