Mozart Balls
I don’t know if you know this, but Mozart was a dirty little sleaze. I didn’t actually learn this in my travels around Salzburg this week, rather, I thought it might be intriguing to go to Salzburg just because I knew this about Mozart. I took an entire class about ole’ Wolfie’s brief but colorful life back in undergrad. Besides of course listening to his work, we were given some biographical material to read, and best of all, the sordid, translated letters written between him and his favorite lady friends. Mozart, dare I say it, had some kind of fecal fascination. Either that or he thought the ladies would get a real rise from him explaining how he’d “shit on their heads.” If you think I’m making this up, pick up Mozart: A Life, by Maynard Solomon and verify it for yourself.
So, Mozart’s “birth house” is indeed in Salzburg, as well as the church he attended, but there’s not a whole lot of other evidence that he was around, unless you count the infinite souvenir tributes capitalizing on this sheer coincidence. Today in Salzburg, Mozart is a rock star. If someone was ever born in the wrong century, maybe it was him. You can buy Mozart CDs, Mozart mugs, Mozart pens, Mozart magnets, Mozart kitchen aprons, Mozart pot holders, Mozart staplers, and the shining star of marketing excellence - “Mozart Balls.” I could make this up, but it just wouldn’t be as awesome. These edible chocolate souvenirs are wrapped in foil stamped with his big-nosed likeness and sold at at least five hundred shops all over town. I really don’t know what they have to do with Mozart, in all honesty. I mean ok, I can certainly come up with some obvious but inappropriate connections, but they don’t seem to be that unique to Wolfgang Amadeus himself. I guess they don’t need to be, because people were still buying them like they were going out of style.
Salzburg is apparently also known for being the place where they filmed a bunch of scenes from The Sound of Music. I can’t give you all the details because that movie actually bugs the heck outta me ever since I worked stage crew for our middle school production when I was in the seventh grade. The old people are loading themselves onto the busses there though, and it’s something like €45 for your authentic Sound of Music tour!
If you really want to visit Salzburg, my advice is - the gardens. The flowers are absolutely stunning, and the cool statues aren’t too bad either. In fact, of all the postcards I sent home to my mom from every country I’ve traveled, the only one she commented on was “that place with the beautiful garden!” This is Mirabelle Garden on the east shore of the Salzach river. I adore the unicorns.
Festung Hohensalzburg (High Salzburg Fortress) isn’t too bad either. It still has some of the original wall decorations, doors, furniture, and a gargantuan ceramic stove, known as the Majolica stove, covered with exotic fruit sculptures and religious motives. The fortress even has an indoor loo on one of the floors (not the bottom floor, mind you) that the explanatory sign said was “accessible from all floors.” I couldn’t determine if this meant that you could get to it from any floor or that there was one like it on every floor… right below this one?
The castle also has a very mentionable view of the whole city too.
I wasn’t actually in Salzburg to see Mozart, believe it or not. It was just a stopover on the way to Vienna, to meet Bee who was playing hooky from the Czech factory to meet me at some convenient halfway point. And really, we were only in Vienna to see some horses, so you can see where this is going already. If you were looking for the Lonely Planet version of our adventures in Austria, this is totally not going to be it.
And my recommendation is, if you’re interested in learning about Mozart the man, don’t go to Salzburg. Watch the movie Amadeus, which, while a fictional account of his life, does an accurate job of portraying his rambunctious personality and lifestyle that he glamorized in his own lascivious correspondence. For even more entertainment, sample some of his translated letters to his lady friends. What a guy.
The entire Salzburg gallery is here.
