Salzburg Preview

I leave for Salzburg on Tuesday, so I was just reading up on it. People were asking.

• Salzburg is just a bit bigger than the small city I live in in Mexico, around 150,000. It has thirty-five churches, a few palaces and a bunch of concert halls
• These include the Grosse Saal in the Mozarteum as well as the Wienersaal, a smaller hall there (where I played a concert when I was a student)
• The Grosse Festspielhaus, the main concert hall of the festival, was opened in 1960 and seats over 2,000. It is inscribed with this motto: SACRA CAMENAE DOMUS / CONCITIS CARMINE PATET / QUO NOS ATTONITOS / NUMEN AD AURAS FERAT (The Muse's holy house is open to those moved by song / divine power bears us up who are inspired)

Click to enlarge

• Salzburg lies just to the north of the alps and one quite imposing mountain, the Untersberg, is less than ten miles to the south

Untersberg, looking over the south of Salzburg, click to enlarge

• When I was in Salzburg as a student, we went up to the top of the mountain via cable car. Spectacular view into Bavaria!
• Despite its small size, Salzburg has a lot of universities. These include:

• Salzburg University of Applied Sciences
• University of Salzburg, a federal public university
• Paracelsus Medical University
• Mozarteum University Salzburg, a public music university
• Alma Mater Europaea, a private university
• SEAD – Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance

• I'm afraid I was rather unkind to a Juilliard student once. He was bragging about being a graduate of that fine school and I couldn't resist saying, after a measured pause, "I attended one of the very few music schools that has a higher reputation than Juilliard..." He gave me a startled look to which I replied "the Mozarteum in Salzburg." That ended that conversation.
• Salzburg during the festival has five orchestras in residence so when you get on a bus you might find yourself fighting to get past several cello cases. And that's not even counting the hundreds of music students!
• Speaking of master classes, I hope to sit in on a couple and maybe see some student concerts. A student concert in Salzburg is probably near the level of a professional concert in most other places.
• I have to confess that one of the things I am particularly looking forward to is wienerschnitzel!

• Accompanied, of  course by a weissbräu, a somewhat cloudy wheat beer:

Let's have some music! This is one prominent resident, Herbert von Karajan, conducting the music of another prominent resident, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. This is the Symphony No. 39 with the Berlin Philharmonic in a concert in Tokyo in 1988.