The Hills Are Alive

www.paulcoia.com

Last week I hinted that my Austrian trip was uneventful. Well, I lied.

I saw a guy die, I visited a brothel, gathered with others around a skeleton which was being exhumed from the ground, got stuck in a lift, was serenaded, saw a part of movie history and was abducted by a pony and trap man. Not bad for a three day trip, eh?

I know you think I’m making it up but I’m not. Like a guy trying to impress a new date with his anatomy, I’m just exaggerating small bits.

For instance I didn’t see the guy die for real and nor did I visit a brothel, but I did attend the rehearsals of an opera set in a bordello with ladies running around half naked and with more hanky panky going on than on a Dubai beach full of British ex pats. I watched the hero prince take ages to die of stab wounds because, like all opera deaths, he took twenty attempts to snuff it. Every time he slumped to the floor the game singer came back gasping and choking to sing one last aria and then collapsed again theatrically like James Brown. I guess it was the thought of all the naked ladies that kept him returning for more but, if I’d had a gun, he and the rehearsal audience wouldn’t have suffered for quite so long.

Ask any new graduate language student and they’ll tell you that most of the world now speaks English or Spanish and that with opera you can usually expect to listen to Italian or German. So, armed with Common Languages For Dense People and another book called Opera For Idiots that I’d bought at the airport, I settled back but soon found myself completely lost till I discovered that this one was being sung in Czechoslovakian. I resisted the urge to sing along.

The opera was part of a festival and, next door, I interviewed the event’s boss on a stage set for Romeo and Juliet. I didn’t meet the singers but, being another opera, you just know that Romeo will be in his Sixties with dyed hair and a beard while Juliet will be so large they can use her bust for the balcony scene. The theatre was magnificent, carved out of a cliff face with hundreds of stone alcoves, and I recognised it as a piece of movie magic. It was the stage where the Von Trapp family sang in concert when trying to escape the Nazis towards the end of the film The Sound Of Music. Had they escaped to the room next door, the sound of Czech opera would have had them running back to surrender.

In Salzburg everywhere seems to be a location from that film which will please many on my flight out from the UK. All were ladies of a certain age with cropped grey hair who had saved up for years for their trip and were wearing T shirts announcing the Croydon Von Trapp Family Fan Club. Periodically I’d see them in horse drawn carriages singing The Lonely Goatherd around town but when I took a trip in a carriage for some filming, the driver mistook my director’s instructions of “go round and bring Paul back to do that piece to camera again”. He thought she’d said “take Paul and get lost”. God knows what he thought he was doing as we sped off but I had visions of being discovered in twenty years time in his cellar with several ladies from Croydon dressed in harnesses and eating hay.

As we trotted along he decided to tell me his life story, followed by a series of jokes all of which were anti women, and he kept repeating that he was happily divorced. I’ve a feeling his ex is even happier.

We passed a small crowd looking at a couple of archaeologists working outside the Residentz beside the Cathedral and they were carefully dusting off a skeleton which they’d found in the ground. That was a bit overwhelming. Here was someone from possibly centuries before with a story to tell but, having lost his tongue, lips, vocal chords and everything else, he was unable to brag or show off his blog. I’m going to follow this up and see what they find out about him over the next few months. If you happen to be outside the Salzburg Residentz over the next few weeks, you’ll see him lying in the square behind some netting. Be careful as he may burst back in to life and sing an aria or two before dying again.

The city is the birthplace of the composer Mozart and a visit to his house is an absolute must, not just to see where the musical genius was born but to marvel at and photograph the eight foot high plastic ice cream cone stuck tastefully on the front to advertise the sweet shop underneath. You can’t miss it as it has neon coloured scoops of strawberry and vanilla with pistachio on top, perhaps appropriate for a famous child prodigy. Later in life Mozart became a freemason which proves all precociously talented young people eventually go mad.

Salzburg is a great place to people watch and I recommend it highly. From the buskers on street corners playing their medieval instruments to the Salvador Dali effete twirly moustached men carrying arts catalogues and discussing the merits of pointillism in the art work of Sesame Street, there’s always someone to stare at and enjoy.

Oh, and I really did get stuck in that lift. It broke down while I was on my way to the opera rehearsal. Unfortunately they fixed it.