The Sound of Music

Months ago, during my first week in Salzburg, I got lost.

I had walked through the Altstadt southward, away from the Dom, and wandered through the winding lanes near the Kajetanerkirche until I reached the southeastern toe of Mönchsberg, the mountain on which sits the massive white fortress, the Festung Hohensalzburg. There I turned right, thinking that I could keep walking clockwise around the mountain and come back round to the Altstadt.

I was wrong. The geography of the city is not that simple. The footprint of the mountain is larger and more complex than I had, naïvely, assumed.

I’ve been to the corner where I turned right several times since, wanting, in part, a clearer mental map of where I went wrong. But I also wanted to find Nonnberg Abbey, which I knew was somewhere nearby. You can see its distinctive red onion-topped steeple from most places in Salzburg, rising over the large blue-green dome of the Dom, nearly as high as the Festung itself. It should be right there, along the streets I walked. But like a mystical city lost in the interstices between this and a parallel universe, the abbey eluded me.

Nonnberg Abbey is a Benedictine convent founded in the 8^th century by St Rupert. It’s reputed to be the oldest convent in the German-speaking world. Part of its fame for tourists to Salzburg is due to its having been the convent where Maria Augusta Kutschera had begun her novitiate before going as a tutor to the family of Georg von Trapp. It is where the pair were married in 1927, and its exterior was a location during the filming of The Sound of Music. I was curious to find it if only to tick it off the list of things to see in Salzburg. (Researching Nonnberg since, I’ve realised there are cultural and aesthetic reasons to make a special trip to visit the abbey.)

Sunday, a warm day with the rain holding off, Himself and I set out on our bicycles to explore the area again. We followed my original route, turning right at the southeastern toe of the mountain, and soon found ourselves on a tiny square opposite a church looking up at the southern aspect of the Festung. There was no sign of the abbey from there. So we turned back and cycled through the twisting lanes again. Still no sign of the abbey, until, at last, we noticed a small street sign set into the stone wall in a small fold in Kaigasse. ‘Nonnberggasse’ it read.

Securing our bikes, we found ourselves at the foot of a very long series of steps that disappeared as they ascended along a narrow passage between buildings. From our vantage on the street, we couldn’t see any sky above them. Exhausted after a long uphill cycle earlier in the day (but that’s another post), we started climbing. A few minutes into the climb with no sign of the end in sight, we spotted a group coming down the steps.

‘There, the man in the green shirt,’ I said, pointing to the figure at the top of our field of vision. ‘If we don’t get there by the time we’re at that step . . .’

Himself completed my thought. ‘We’ll reconsider our options.’

But, when we reached that point, we were at the top of the steps and Stift Nonnberg was to our right. A gravel path swept around the edge of the mountain; spread out beyond us was the green Salzach valley. Directly below, we could see the narrow street with its domed church and tiny green square we had recently left. From here, I could see the steep path than ran from the street level to where we were, another way to reach the abbey. Nearby, a large sign outlined the geological history of the valley. We were standing where once, hundreds of thousands of years ago, an enormous glacial lake had covered the region.

At our backs was the small gate to abbey itself. Inside it, we found a compact courtyard in front of the church. Inset in its stone walls were memorial stones carved in low relief, some of them with naïve-looking images, some with ornate death’s heads and inscriptions in German Gothic script. Several graves ranged along  the wall, three of them seemingly completely overgrown with ivy. I thought of the women who lay there, their names obscured, with no children or grandchildren to remember them. Does the same oblivion await me, I wondered, with no descendents to recall my life?

There was a constrained feeling about the courtyard, enclosed narrowly between the wall separating it from the outer path and the walls of the church itself. Himself remarked that he could still not see the distinctive red onion steeple, but, craning our necks and searching overhead, we saw it at last, rising overhead with a gilt clock on its tower. It was quiet on this late Sunday afternoon, in the small courtyard far above the busy plätze and gassen below, most of them filled with tourists, festival goers and ordinary Salzburgers enjoying a dry warm day. A bird sang in the tree, and we spoke quietly, conscious of the privacy of the nuns within. At last, though, we mounted the worn red stone porch, pushed open a thick, battered wooden door, and passed between the carved figures on the jambs of the Gothic doorway.

The interior was illuminated faintly by dim light passing through high clerestory windows. It is small, a late Gothic church, containing a nave, two aisles and side chapels under groin vaulting. Completed in 1506, it replaced an earlier Romanesque church destroyed by fire in 1423. We could barely make out the soaring winged altarpiece beyond the chancel arch, its gilt flamboyance dulled in the half dark. Beneath the altar is a crypt where the remains of St Erentrudis, the founding abbess, lie. Steps on either side of the altar lead down to it. Peering into it, I could see stone floors and wooden benches reflecting the half light. At the back of the church, under the nuns’ choir and behind clear panels, one can see the faded colours of the remains of graceful frescos from the older, replaced Romanesque building.

These details we noticed later, though. What we were first aware of, after the creaking groans had subsided when the heavy door clanged shut, as our eyes adjusted to the low light and we seated ourselves on uncomfortable wooden pews, was music. A choir of women’s voices was singing, their voices drifting towards us from somewhere above. Opposite us sat a young man, alone, motionless. A few pews in front of us was a couple, also motionless as they listened. We sat, rapt, enchanted. It was the nuns at their afternoon office, sung gracefully with rich, sweet voices, accompanied by organ. Now and again a soprano voice rose above the rest in melodic solo before rejoining her sisters in the chorus.

Conscious that we had, once again, been lucky in our timing, we sat in the near dark listening for some minutes. I turned round to see high above us, at that back of the nave, the windows into the nuns’ private choir. They had been swung open. Looking up, I could see frescos decorating its shallow vaulted ceiling. I could see nothing else, though. The nuns were secluded in their own world, celebrating their centuries-long monastic tradition.

After a time, the singing stopped; the organ continued, swelling majestically. Then there was silence. Silence above and silence below, as we eavesdroppers in the half-dark sat still, still wrapped in the heavenly voices, still held in the magic middle passage, that enchanted space that marks the transition between song and absence of song.

The silence stretched out. At last came a quiet swish, swish, swish from beyond the windows above. Himself leaned toward me and whispered, ‘It’s the chair seats flipping up.’

That it was. We stood, ready to let the day continue in its flow as we slipped once again into the life of Salzburg.

Easter in the Altstadt

The Stiftskirche is the church of St Peter’s Benedictine Abbey in Salzburg’s Altstadt. The abbey was founded in the 7th century by St Rupert. The Stiftskirche itself dates from the Romanesque period, but it was extensively rebuilt in the 17th and 18th century. I happened into it on the afternoon of Good Friday and, leaving, I noticed that the music on Easter Sunday’s 10.15 mass would include Mozart’s Mass in C Minor and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. That would be interesting, I thought, if we could get ourselves there at that hour.

So Sunday morning we cycled 20 minutes along the bike path that runs beside the Salzach into the city centre and found our way through the maze of streets and platzes to the old church. We got off to a late start, so the priest was just finishing his sermon when we crept from the porch into the back of the nave. Others were entering as well, including a middle-aged couple just in front of us carrying a small basket covered with a cloth embroidered ‘JHS’ – Christ’s initials.

We breathed in thick incense as we stood in the crowd at the back, awed by the Baroque magnificence of the church. Its long barrel vault is white, ornamented closely with pale green rococo filigree plasterwork. Along its length, the vault is supported by an arched colonnade, above which hang enormous paintings. Where the vault joins the colonnade, there are lunette windows, through which light on this sunny morning poured.

Along the colonnaded nave stand monumental marble altarpieces, heavy with paintings and massive silver candlesticks. Above them are brightly painted and heavily gilded life-sized statures. Over the chancel rises a large dome; this morning, light from its cupola flooded the altar below. Flowers were massed on the altar, and statues and vessels on it glinted gold. A row of priests and altar servers in red or black vestments covered by white lace surplices stood as the priest lead the mass in musically intoned German, singing in the old style of the Latin mass.

Overwhelmed by sound, light, colour, smell, we took a while to find our bearings, but gradually we moved along the side aisle to midway the length of the church. Then, from the organ loft over the back of the nave, Mozart’s Mass resumed, with orchestra and chorus, the soprano’s voice rising clear and pure, more piercing than the light pouring through the cupola, as piercing, one wants to believe, as Constanze’s soprano when the work was first performed, in 1783, with Mozart conducting in this very church.

We stood through the rest of the mass, transfixed by the music, by colour and image, light and shadow, the melodic intonation of the mass itself. Gradually we moved from the side aisle to a position behind a bank of pew where we could see the altar more clearly. Periodically, Mozart’s music soared, punctuating the mass. I was half lost in a trance, succumbing to the ecstasy one feels sure the artistry and excess of ornamentation, gold, silver, light and scent were meant to inspire.

I felt this all without an scintilla of belief, even, at times, with a kind of simmering antipathy, given the complete collapse of moral authority the church is undergoing from the pope down. Yet the experience of the mass in this context has its own fascination, especially as a unifier of community, however briefly, as during the sign of peace, which I’ve always found moving.

The mass at last ended. At the end, the priest lifted his hands and, against the background of gold, blessed the food which people had brought in their baskets, an Easter tradition here. Then the organ began a sumptuous voluntary and the bell in the Romanesque tower began to toll. Leaving, we walked beside a father who looked down at his small daughter skipping beside him, swinging a basket with the Easter food. Amid the crowd we made our way out of the church and stood in the platz in front of it watching as Salzburgers poured out, many wearing traditional elements of dress – Bavarian jackets, lederhosen, wool hats and capes.

With the bells continuing to toll overhead, the notes deep and rich, we wandered around the side and to the back of St Peter’s to explore the St Petersfriedhof cemetery, the oldest in Salzburg, with its wrought-iron painted grave markers and freshly planted bright yellow flowers. Through I’m sure there are graves more ancient, the oldest marker I’ve spotted is dated 1717. A few metres away was a grave so new the ribbons on the burial wreaths were still fresh.

From from the cemetery, we passed through two more platzes before coming to the platz in front of the enormous Italianate cathedral, the Dom. St Peter’s bells were still ringing from a couple of hundred metres away. Then, just a few minutes later, mass ended in the Dom, and people streamed out of that building as its bells, more sonorous and elaborate, began to toll. All told, as we stood and wandered and watched, the bells from the two churches must have rung virtually continuously for a half hour, deep, loud, tremendous bell tolling, the sound vibrating right through me, as if the atoms of my body merged with the vibrating air around me.

And so we explored and absorbed the sounds and sights of Easter in Salzburg until it was time to find our bicycles in the maze of streets before cycling along side the Salzach, its waters pale blue-green, on a fresh spring morning, gradually leaving the city behind us.