Amuse me, Mozart

After my Sound of Music speed walk through Salzburg early Thursday morning, I was able to return to the hotel, cool down, have some breakfast, take some photos from the rooftop restaurant,

and meet the group in the lobby at the appointed time where we began our guided walking tour of the city. Today’s Earthbound segment would culminate with lunch at St. Peter’s Stiftskeller and the distribution of tickets to visit the Mozart family apartment and Mozart’s Geburtshaus (the birth house of W.A. Mozart). We’d then have a free afternoon to use them as we saw fit.

There’s good, better, and best but also bad, worse, and Horst

There’s no question that Horst, our guide to be, was tall. Perhaps less than two meters but certainly more than 1.9. (For my American friends, that would place him between 6’2″ and 6’6″.) Slim, with a neatly trimmed gray beard and wearing a stylish hat, after Shlomit’s introduction he greeted us with a very discernable German accent. Initially, I supposed he was being mildly self-deprecating when he talked about his height making him easy to spot and about his seven decades in Salzburg. This made me eager to hear the stories he might relate. Like Moses and his toeses, my initial impression supposed erroneously.

As we marched out the door, I quickly gathered that Horst had a plan and (possibly) a schedule. He’d march us to a spot where he had something to say and begin talking – often with the group a few steps behind him trying to catch up or spread out taking photos – usually too quietly for everyone to both hear and parse through his accent. Once he’d made his point of fact, it was mach schnell to the next spot.

And you didn’t contradict Horst. As we walked into Residenzplatz I mentioned that the fountain had been included in The Sound of Music.

“Not correct,” Horst told me reminding me of his seven decades in Salzburg. He would show me the correct place later. (I might have been in Salzburg less than a day but I knew the movie and I knew I was right.)

I won’t say that I learned nothing from Horst’s walk. He took us not just past but into the first floor of the Old Town Hall where the Hall of Pillars frequently hosts exhibitions by Salzburg artists. The building’s rococo façade from 1772 and the clock tower certainly draw one’s attention. (The clock tower also made a good orientation landmark.) He led us along the Judengasse that was the hub of Jewish life in Salzburg from at least 1284 until the Jews were expelled in 1498 and is still an important shopping street but I don’t recall him pointing out the only remaining pure Art Nouveau doorway in Salzburg at number 3.

(Wikimedia Commons – by luckyprof (talk) CC by SA Austria 3.0)

He also pointed out the Café Tomaselli – the oldest café not only in Salzburg but in Austria – on the Alter Markt. However, for the most part, Horst underwhelmed. My contemporaneous note made that evening simply says, “Possibly worst city guide ever.”

The surprisingly contemporary oldest restaurant

The first claim you hear about St. Peter’s Stiftskeller (sometimes Stiftskulinarium) is that it’s the world’s oldest restaurant. It’s first cited in the Carmina anthology in the year 803 by someone called Alcuin – one of Charlemagne’s top religious scholars. However, if you go to the Guinness Book of World Records you’ll see that they award the world’s oldest restaurant title to Madrid’s Sobrino de Botín that opened more than nine centuries later in 1725. How, you might reasonably wonder, can one reconcile this gap?

The answer seems to lie with the fact that the Salzburg restaurant has closed for long stretches periodically throughout its history – most notably during the Napoleonic invasions while Sobrino de Botín has operated continuously in the same location since it opened.

As for St. Peter’s Stiftskeller, the building is at the base of the Mönchsberg and is partly built into the rock face adjoining the Cathedral. Our group didn’t tour the 11 different dining rooms the restaurant houses  – the newest of which was added 600 years ago and we had our lunch (three courses from a fixed menu, yay!) in the Willibaldarkaden – the inner courtyard with arcaded seating spaces carved from the rock.

I didn’t record what I ate but my note says lunch was wonderful.

An afternoon with Ross and Andrea

Even when I’m part of a group, I’m usually a solo traveler and, as you’ve seen, I approach these trips with different external (some might say peculiar) interests from what might otherwise seem a cohesive group such as the enjoyment of classical music that brought most of us to this particular Earthbound Expeditions journey. When the group has free time, I’m always prepared to spend it on my own. Alternatively, I’ll almost always welcome anyone who expresses an interest in joining me and I was pleasantly surprised when Ross suggested spending the afternoon together. In fact, more than pleasantly surprised because, while I would have welcomed anyone, of those in the group, I was most comfortable spending time with him and Andrea and Bob and Betty.

The first stop I wanted to make was at St. Petersfriedhof which was literally around the corner from the restaurant. But proximity wasn’t the only reason to visit this cemetery – the oldest in Salzburg. That alone would have been a reason to visit but, as the pitchman says, “Wait. There’s more!” Although no scenes were filmed in the cemetery, it served as the model for the one built on a sound stage in Hollywood for the climactic scenes in The Sound of Music. Finally, it is also the place where Maria Anna (Nannerl) Mozart is buried. In fact, she and Michael Haydn, Franz Joseph’s younger brother and an underappreciated composer, share a communal grave in a corner of the cemetery.

St. Peter’s is still a working cemetery and when we entered preparations were afoot for a service in the chapel. Ross and I prevailed on one of the staff who kindly led us to this gravesite.

From there we were off to the place where W.A. Mozart geburts onto the the scene (Oh, how I wish this could have been “geburst.”)

and to the “Dance Masters House” – a more upscale and spacious eight room apartment on Makartplatz where the family lived from 1773-1787. According to Salzburg.info, the appellation was bestowed because “a certain Lorenz Spöckner had been offering dancing lessons there for the nobility, in preparation for their life at court.” (The two apartments are on opposite sides of the Salzach river which we crossed more than once so I don’t recall the sequence of the visits.)

I picked up some interesting facts in these two places about Nannerl and someone we haven’t heard from since my first day in Vienna, Antonio Salieri and I’ll have considerably more to say about both in subsequent posts. After finishing our time with the Mozart family, we set off in search of a small dress shop that Shlomit and Kathlene had told Andrea about and, thanks to some intrepid work by Ross, located it just as it was about to close. It was a success for both the dressmaker (who made a sale) and Andrea who had a new dress she could wear in Prague if she so chose.

Because every day spent walking as much as we did deserves ice cream, we wandered back to the Alter Markt and Café Tomaselli that is, as Horst told us, billed as the oldest coffee house in Austria. The French-born Johann Fontaine opened the original on 31 March 1700 on Goldgasse likely 100 meters or so from its present location. In 1764, Anton Staiger, who had taken over the business 11 years earlier, purchased building on today’s Alter Markt and Carl Tomaselli bought the café in 1852. It has remained Tomaselli’s ever since. I had three scoops.

Plenty of daylight remained so I suggested we return to Mirabell Garden since we had to pass it on the way to the hotel. I led us all to the Dwarf Garden and I think my companions found it as enchanting as I.

We ended a delightful (for me and I hope for them) afternoon with dinner at the hotel’s rooftop restaurant and a final evening look at the Alps.

Tomorrow morning we will bid auf wiedersehen to Salzburg and Austria as we head off to Prague with a stop along the way at the UNESCO World Heritage town of Český Krumlov. Meanwhile as usual, here are the rest of the day’s photos.