The Salzburg Tales Read Free

Salzburg Tales
at random, relishing its heterogeneity: stories that are uncanny, fantastic, morbid, ghostly, lighthearted; tales from various traditions, others that are startlingly original; some neatly resolved narratives, others enigmatic. Its full achievement comes clear when read from beginning to end, for it is more than the sum of its parts. In addition to the pleasures of individual tales, as day follows day incremental detail registers in the developing interactions among the tales and tellers. At eighty years old,
The Salzburg Tales
continues to excite and amaze.
    Quotations from Christina Stead’s essays ‘Ocean of Story’ and ‘A Writer’s Friends’ are taken from
Ocean of Story: The uncollected stories of Christina Stead
,edited by RG Geering (Viking/Penguin, Ringwood, 1985). Hazel Rowley’s
Christina Stead: A Biography
(William Heinemann Australia, Melbourne, 1993) continues to be an invaluable resource. Michael P Steinberg’s
The Meaning of the Salzburg Festival: Austria as Theater and Ideology
(Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1990) informs part of my discussion. I have also drawn on
Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake
, edited by Margaret Harris (The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2005), and Christina Stead’s
A Web of Friendship: Selected Letters (1928
–
1973)
, edited by RG Geering (Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1992).

The Prologue
    S ALZBURG , old princely and archiepiscopal city, and its fortress Hohen-Salzburg, lie among the mountains of the Tyrol, in Salzburg Province, in Austria. The river Salzach, swift and yellow from the glaciers and streaming mountain valleys, flows between baroque pleasure-castles standing in glassy lakes, and peasant villages pricked in their vineyards, and winds about to reflect the citadel rising in its forests, single eminence in the plain. The river divides the city, leaving a wooded mound on either hand, rushes noisily under the bridges between Italian domes and boulevarded banks, and rolls out, placid, fast and deep, towards the Bavarian plain and the rainburdened evening sky.
    Yesterday morning, the city flashed like an outcrop of rock-crystals in its cliffs by the river: in the evening, rain-clouds sat on the Kapuzinerberg and the Mönchsberg and squirted their black waters on the town and beat down the mild leafage of the woods. This morning the clouds rolled away with troutside gleams under a fresh wind, and the river, risen a foot in the night, and roaring like the wind, is again calm and yellow. And now, on this last day of July, the townspeople look at the red walls of the naked Tyrol far off and at the giant peak of the Untersberg, like a hatchet in the air, and all their conversation is that they hope it will be fine for the first day of the August festival, the great event of Salzburg men.
    Now the streets are full: bands of German students in blue linen coats with rucksacks and staves lope through the town at a round pace, counting the monuments and ignoring the tourists; foreign women in summer dresses peer in jewellers’ windows full of Swiss clocks and edelweiss pressed under glass, foreign gentlemen buy tufts of reindeer hair to put in their hats, and trout-flies; the milk-wagons are busy, the elegants sit in the cafés and drink coffee with cream, and the men going home from work on their bicycles glance thirstily in the low leaded panes of beer-cellars on the Linzergasse, and see severe Berlin merchants and tall blond American college boys drinking good Salzburg beer. A stage has been put up in the Cathedral Place for the Miracle Play of “Jedermann”, German bands are playing Mozart and Wagner in all the cafés, the Residenz Platz is packed with visitors waiting to hear the Glockenspiel at six o’clock ring out its antique elfin tunes, tourists pop in and out of the house at number nine, Getreide-gasse, where Mozart was born, musicians and actors are walking and