The Sound of Music (and other Austrian culture)

Salzburg is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve visited! It is quite simply amazing. It’s got a medieval castle, great cafés and is surrounded by the Alps. What more could you ask? Say, for example, locations used in the Sound of Music? Oh yeh!

Now, if you care enough to read my blog (Hi Mum) you probably know I have a bit of a nerdy appreciation for ‘The Sound’. I blame my sister. She watched it over and over again during my formative years. What a weirdo.

Penny, however, had only seen The Sound once. ONCE! We were looking online for a place to stay and suddenly I heard an exclamation coming from her – “We can stay in the actual von Trapp house”. Yes that’s right – THE ACTUAL VON TRAPP HOUSE!!! It’s now a quite nice guest house, and really not too expensive. It wasn’t used in the film. But it was used by Himmler as a holiday house. Swings and roundabouts. Here we are approaching it. I may be a little excited. 

Ok, so it’s a pretty big house. But it’s not the palace that the movie depicts. It also doesn’t have huge grounds, though it’s entirely possible the grounds maybe have been subdivided since the Trapps lived there. Certainly no rotunda I could see, and it’s also not set on a lake! Here I am looking all pensive and stuff at the back door.

And this is the drawing room, where apparently they used to sing!

And here's penny doing her best Gretl impersonation on the stairs!

So I dragged Penny around Salzburg to see the sites used in the movie. So she says. I think she actually quite enjoyed it. I had looked online and found a few places used. Now, if you think about it, there’s really only a few songs filmed outside. I Have Confidence, when Maria first leaves the convent to go to the Trapps, and Do Re Mi. Oh yeh and the opening title song, but that could be any green Alpine hill! The rest are pretty much filmed on sound stages.

So let’s go through them. Here’s the convent gate, which was used in the film at the start of I Have Confidence, when the kids come to visit Maria and when the Nazis search for them. 

Also this is the convent yard, parts of which you can see in that song.

This is in one of the main squares of Salzburg, just down the hill from the convent, and I’m reenacting (so realistic!) a bit of action from it.

And then Maria arrives and freaks out, and I’m pretty sure this is the gate they use! I think the front exterior house is right nearby but we didn’t realise at the time.

And then there’s the park where large part of Do Re Mi were filmed. There are two fountains and I couldn’t remember which one was used, but had a feeling it was this one. As it turns out they’re both used!
This is the Mozart bridge – he was born in Salzburg. And there’s a brief shot of Maria and the kids running across it gleefully.

The famous I Am 16 Going on 17 rotunda was on a soundstage for the movie, but apparently this is the genuine thing! It’s in a park a bit out of town, which was also very pretty!

I hadn’t actually seen the movie for years before going, so we missed a few things. But that night we watched it in the von Trapps drawing room. That was fun in itself, but we realised that a whole bunch of things we had seen that day were also in the movie! The Mozart bridge was one of those. Also in the Do Re Mi park there were these funny little statues that Penny thought were quite amusing. It turns out there’s like a two second shot of them running past it during that song. There was a lot of “We were there!” action.

Okay, I know it’s not very cool, but we had a good time.

We only stayed one night in Salzburg which I think was a mistake. It’s just so pretty that I could easily spend a few days just wandering around drinking hot chocolate. Also the Alps are right there, so there’d be plenty of walking to do. Here's one angle of the big ole' castle that the town is kind of built around.

From there we moseyed onto Vienna. It’s a very pretty city, and you very much get the sense of a grand old imperial capital. Which it is. 

This is one of the main squares, and apparently the balcony is where Hitler spoke when Germany annexed Austria.

We of course went to see the Danube. It was really more of a brown, than a blue. 

Penny and I decided we needed to have one hot chocolate a day. Sometimes this was too. We went to a series of increasingly grand cafés in search of the best. Penny also has no real idea how much pastry a person needs to consume in one day, and insisted that we have at least a few. I felt this was a bit ludicrous, but acquiesced in the interests of peace. Everything in Austria comes with whipped cream. It was a bit overwhelming by the end.

In return for me suffering pastries in silence, I demanded that we visit the grave of Franz Schubert, the famous composer. She made outrageous claims that I’m not actually related to him. He’s buried between Beethoven, Brahms and Strauss – aka the big league. My Uncle Russ said he heard Schubert was “a raving homosexual”, though he never believed it. Either way, he apparently died of syphilis. Poor form, Uncle Franz.

 

On the last day we were wandering around and came across a bunch of people in what you might term ‘Austrian national dress’. They were colour coordinated, had a marching band and dudes with rifles in a very, very poor formation firing them into the air. Then after a while another group of people with a marching band in a different colour marched into the square – and then another one!

I approached the prettiest girl I could find to ask what was going on. She said it was people from Tirol, which is around Innsbruck, who come here every year for some sort of festival, and the different groups were all from different sub-regions. She had a little flagon of schnapps, and it was her job to offer a small glass to the mayor of Vienna. She had some left over and offered it to us! So marching bands, pretty girls in dirndls and free schnapps – not bad, not bad at all.