| There once
was a Prince Archbishop of Salzburg named Leopold Anton
Eleutherius Freiherr von Firmian, who was a descendant of a
century-old, South Tyrolean noble family. In 1736 he named his
newly acquired property LEOPOLDSKRON, a combination of his
first name Leopold and the second part of "Mezzocorone", his home
town, which translated into "Krone", the German world for
"crown".
Although
Firmian was highly educated in the sciences and had a fine
appreciation for art, he was nevertheless responsible for the
expulsion of 22,000 Protestants from Salzburg, which greatly harmed
his family’s reputation. Thus he instructed the Scottish
Benedictine monk Bernhard Stuart to design the rococo-palace as a
prestigious family residence in an effort to partially restore the
family’s social standing.
The Sound
of Music
In 1965 the
film The Sound of Music, directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie
Andrews, was produced in Salzburg with the grounds adjacent to
those of Schloss Leopoldskron as one of the main locations. The
palace was never used as the back of the Von Trapp villa, although
even some tours of Salzburg claim that it is. Scenes filmed on the
adjacent property (known as Bertelsmann, at the time), include the
family drinking pink lemonade ("not too sweet, not too sour, just
too... pink!") on the terrace, Maria and the Captain arguing on the
terrace, and the children falling off the boat in the lake. Only
shots showing the lake, were filmed there, using a replica of
Leopoldskron's terrace, and horse-gates, leading to the lake. Any
shots showing the building itself, were filmed at Schloss
Frohnburg. The ballroom for the interior shootings, which were done
in a studio, is a copy of the Venetian room from the
palace.
The setting
for the two main love scenes, one between Liesl and Rolf (featuring
the song Sixteen Going on Seventeen) and the other between Maria
and the Captain (Something Good) was the glass gazebo originally
situated in the garden of the palace. The gazebo was later moved to
the other side of the lake to allow tourists to visit it, but after
their numbers became to big it was again relocated to the Hellbrunn
Palace outside of the city. |