‘A joyful place’: a new museum coaxes Austrians to embrace The Sound of Music

Sixty years after the film’s release, Salzburg is embracing a Hollywood classic it once kept at arm’s length

Prefer the Guardian on Google Let’s start at the very beginning – famously, a very good place to start.

Just two decades after the second world war, a Hollywood crew descended on Salzburg with stars, show tunes and a compelling, essentially true story of love and opposition to Adolf Hitler: The Sound of Music.

The Austrian city, still economically and morally devastated from the Nazi period, wasn’t quite ready to receive them.

Although director Robert Wise was free to make use of the glorious Alpine settings and the old town’s historical facades, scenes such as soldiers marching across the central Residenzplatz under swastika flags made municipal authorities deeply uneasy.