Photos, points, and aperçus from Mozart’s hometown
Man, these sandwiches are made for me — almost literally.
That’s a display in the Frankfurt airport. There are so many such displays in that airport. I think of it as more a food emporium than an airport.
• There he is, greeting you at the Salzburg airport. Who? Mozart. Salzburg is his town.
• There he is again.
• But hang on, it’s Doppler’s town, too. Christian Doppler, the great mathematician and physicist. Don’t forget his effect.
• Don’t you think this must be Homer Simpson’s favorite place?
• This fellow was born in Switzerland — one of the great figures of the German Renaissance. He was born around 1492, when Columbus was sailing the ocean blue. He was a physician, a philosopher — other things. Spent some of his years in Salzburg, and died here, in 1541.
Paracelsus must have done a lot of thinking, as in this pose.
• Hey, is that your car, parked in front of the Sacher Hotel? A sweet, spidery Porsche.
• Or maybe this is your car? I didn’t know they made a Mercedes in that color. Pretty cool.
• Once, as I was leaving for Salzburg, Bill Buckley e-mailed, “Say hello to music for me!” I would. I do.
• The Salzburg Festival is the leading classical-music festival in the world. But Salzburg excels in street music, too. Some of it is classical, granted: I hear a young woman play a Bach cello suite. But I also hear “Mood Indigo,” the Duke Ellington number, played by a smooth ensemble.
Then you have your basic oompah band. The men are cute — quaint. In their Oktoberfesty clothes. But they are more than cute and quaint: damn good musicians, on those sometimes unwieldy brass instruments.
• The hills are alive (to quote a song):
• Schloss Leopoldskron, unchanging:
• A mighty fortress . . .
• A little majesty for you . . .
• Salzburg is full of lovely smells (to go with a few unlovely ones, as from the horses). I smell a fair amount of cigarette smoke, which is interesting. At home, I almost never smell cigarette smoke. New York is pervaded by skunk weed, I think they call it. The most obnoxious pot.
The cigarette smoke, in this little burg? I find it almost a relief. (Not that I endorse smoking, mind you. I’m just talking about smells.)
• In a handsome, proud square:
• The courtyard of a museum — making a statement about Ukraine, I gather:
The sunflower, as you know, has become a worldwide symbol of Ukraine.
• A glimpse of the Altstadt, the Old City:
• Another glimpse, from farther away:
• You know how ready-made sandwiches in our grocery stores can be a little . . . gross? Other countries’ grocery-store sandwiches prove that they don’t have to be . . .
• Children playing gaily — one of the most satisfying sights (and sounds) in any city or country, on any continent, in any era. One of the best things about life . . .
• I hear a lot of Italian spoken in this city. And there are a lot of Italian tourists on bicycles. Not city bikes, the kind you rent. I mean the kind you ride through countries on.
Lot of French spoken, too.
A good amount of Japanese tourists in the Mirabell Gardens. I wonder whether they’re thinking — given the excellence of Japanese gardens — “These ain’t so hot.”
• When I started coming here in the early 2000s, I saw migrants, from South Asia and the Middle East. I wondered whether they would stay. I wondered whether their children would assimilate.
Today, these kids are in their late teens, early twenties. I see them working, chatting away with their peers in Salzburg dialect.
I have a great deal to say about this. But I am doing a breezy journal, and will move on, saving immigration and assimilation for another time . . .
Hell, maybe I can say just this — something I have said in Impromptus before: The most powerful drive in the world — apart from sex, possibly — is the desire to blend in. To conform. Often, this is bad. In any case, it is so, I believe.
• I meet a young Salzburger in an ice-cream parlor, and she speaks very good English, with American pronunciation. She has never been. But she watches American TV shows. “I want to go to New York!” she says. I warn her: “Not as clean as Salzburg, you know.” She responds, “I know!”
Okay, then. Buyer beware . . .
• At last! They have made a club for me:
• Kind of a pretty little house — or not so little — wouldn’t you say?
• Pedestrians here will not cross the street on red if there are no cars from here till Greece, Norway, Estonia, or Ireland. Their feet simply will not move. But my American feets got to go . . .
• A river:
• A bend in the river, to quote a famous Naipauline phrase:
• For about 20 years, I have conducted public interviews under the auspices of the Salzburg Festival Society. This summer, one of our guests is Riccardo Muti, the venerable Italian conductor. Before our audience, he could not be more personable: candid, lively, offbeat, funny. A great mimic, Muti is. A fabulous communicator. That’s on and off the podium.
I used to say of Bill Buckley, “He makes everything more vivid. The air crackles when he is around. You feel more alive than usual. All the senses are heightened. Everything is in technicolor.”
Have you known such people? No doubt. Well, Riccardo Muti is one of them — another of them.
• It is a pleasure, too, to have Lea Desandre and Thomas Dunford in our series. She is a singer, a mezzo-soprano, of French and Italian origins. He is a lutenist, a Frenchman with an American father. They often perform together, and they appear in our series together. Marvelous, and marvelously talented, young people. Catch them when you can.
Lea, by the way, spent many years training in ballet. She looks as much ballerina as singer. (More, actually!)
• A man in the audience was sketching Lea as we talked. Here it is:
• And here is — oh, dear:
• A friend of mine here in Salzburg had a relative who lived in Ithaca, N.Y. One year, he came to visit. Hadwig’s mother — Hadwig is my friend — had three soft-boiled eggs for him. It was Hadwig’s job to wash the dishes. First, she licked the cups in which the soft-boiled eggs had been.
“We were not very poor,” she says. “We did not starve. But we had very little food — and so many eggs? Unheard of. I think that if he had known we never got eggs, he would have been glad to give me one!”
• Among the festival-goers, I meet a woman born and raised in Hong Kong. She has lived in London for many years now. She fears — she thinks — she will never go back to Hong Kong. Hong Kong is a city I never visited. (Interesting I think of the city as dead and gone.) Will it ever be free again? Alive again? Only when Communism falls in vast China itself.
• Here is a slogan I can get behind, 100 percent: “Mozart for all.”
• Maybe you would enjoy a night shot:
• A little, residential lane:
• A bustling summer scene:
• Another view:
• Thanks so much for joining me, my friends. One last shot, maybe — looking out from Schloss Leopoldskron, of an evening:
Later on.
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