Salzburg has been a magical place for centuries. Guests as diverse as composer Franz Schubert, author James Joyce, King Edward VIII of England, suffragette Jane Addams, maestro Arturo Toscanini, and actress Marlene Dietrich have all extolled it. More recently, American presidents Nixon and Ford have visited it as participants in high-level talks.
But Salzburg has had its detractors--Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for on. He found the town dull, provincial, and with abominable taste in music. As for all that physical beauty? External surroundings didn't matter to Mozart all that much.
In turn, Salzburg rejected Mozart. Ironically the town that ignored the genius of its native son almost two centuries ago has made itself a virtual shrine to that genius. Its sixty-seven-year-old summer music festival, one of the most prestigious and expensive in the world, could not exist without Mozart's music, something the festival's founders were well aware of when establishing it.
The recent film Amadeus offended Salzburger pride. They were not bothered that the film became a box-office hit and spawned designer clothes, Swiss wristwatches, and a rock tune of the same name. It wasn't the poor taste that bothered Salzburgers or even that the movie was as much fiction as fact. Rather, it was that not one scene was set in Salzburg--not one, even though the composer had lived there for twenty-five of his thirty-five years on earth.
But economics won out, and Salzburg joined the Amadeus bandwagon. Its merchants carried hot pink T-shirts with Mozart's profile in powdered wig and the word AMADEUS printed below. Record stores sold the sound track from the film. Moviegoers visited Mozart's birthplace on the Getreidegasse, many of them young, some having never heard of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart before this film. Salzburgers have shown a remarkable practicality throughout their long history, perhaps resulting from the pragmatic nature of their political history. In any event, they have adapted regularly to changing times and tastes.
Tourism has dominated Salzburg's economy and fame throughout much of its history. While decisions are often made with that in mind, Salzburg promotes itself on its own terms by telling its own story in its own way. As a result, Salzburg has celebrated such seemingly abstruse events as the 900th anniversary of its high fortress Hohensalzburg, one of the best preserved medieval structures in the world. Now, between May 16 and October 26, 1987, something even stranger is being organized--a 1.5 million dollar exhibition commemorating the ascension of one wolf Dietrich von Raitenau to the archiepiscopal throne four hundred years ago.
Raitenau's life was so colorful, his dreams so magnificent, that no director or writer needs to fictionalize them. Without Raitenau the festival that honors Mozart's name might never have come into existence. To understand this Renaissance prince is to know something of Salzburg's rich and complex history.
Government by archbishops
Human communities formed some six thousand years ago in the area that is now Salzburg, during the New Stone Age. The Illyrians, the Celts, and the Romans, all left their imprint.
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