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Salzburg: Let’s start at the very beginning.

I first saw it as a child, sprawled on the carpet, eyes wide, heart open. I didn’t understand Nazis or nuns or Austria. I just knew it made me feel safe – and that singing seemed like a solution.

Julie Andrews as Maria didn’t just conquer the von Trapps in The Sound of Music, she conquered the world.Credit:

Now I’m in Salzburg’s Mirabell Gardens, standing on the Do-Re-Mi steps where TikTokers are filming themselves lip-syncing with exaggerated glee.

A teenage girl in glittery Crocs twirls in front of the Pegasus Fountain. A retiree from America conducts an imaginary orchestra. Off to the side, a pair of Korean women harmonise gently on My Favourite Things, competing with a Bluetooth speaker that’s slightly out of sync.

It’s chaos. It’s charming. It’s exactly what this city once tried hard to ignore.

Sixty years ago, The Sound of Music was met in Austria with a shrug. Too kitschy, too American, too far removed from the real Salzburg. Christopher Plummer, who played the stoic Captain von Trapp, famously dismissed it as “The Sound of Mucus”. But even he softened over time, later conceding that the film, which he once resented, had quite literally made him. Salzburg has had a similar reckoning.

For decades, the city’s elite winced as tourists arrived asking for the singing steps and “the house where Maria made clothes from curtains”. But embarrassment has long since turned to embrace – partly from affection, mostly from economics.

The film draws more than 350,000 tourists a year, pumping millions into hotels, bus tours, strudel stands and gift shops stocked with marionette goats. It’s........

© The Age