A traveller stepping off the train at Bad Ischl finds that his first walk through this Upper Austrian spa town is, in many ways, already mapped out for him. Of the three streets that fan out from the roundabout in front of the station, he is most likely to take the one in the middle. Running almost at a right angle to the railway, it promises – as he knows well from experience – the quickest route into the heart of the town. (Later he will discover that the road to the left cuts across the concrete forecourt of the bus station and then trails along a deserted reach of the Traun, carrying him past the centre altogether, while the one to the right, a busy arterial road, swings far to the north in a broad arc before shopfronts, café terraces and guesthouses proclaim that he has finally come to the town centre.)
On this first stroll, Emperor Franz Joseph Street – the town’s most culturally resonant and evocative thoroughfare – will almost certainly escape his notice. Before he chances upon it, he is likely to wander through all the other arteries of the town. At Savings Bank Square, reached soon after leaving the station road, the entrance to the street lies concealed behind a small park, while his curiosity is caught instead by the bustle at the far end of the square, drawing him past it. From there, Parish Street, Bad Ischl’s main shopping promenade, leads him to a Gothic Revival fountain and a crossroads. Two branches beckon: Elisabeth Bridge, arcing over the river, and the Archduchess Sophie Esplanade, tracing the riverbank with the promise of mountain views. He explores both banks of the Traun, only to find that Graz Street, which begins at the bridge, produces no square or avenue of topographical importance. He returns to the intersection and follows the last unexplored branch, Wirer Street, to its end. With the suburbs stretching away to the left, he turns back to the traffic-heavy road towards the station and follows the signs to the celebrated Imperial Villa – for if he knows nothing else of Bad Ischl, he surely knows that Emperor Franz Joseph I favoured spending his summers here. The Emperor’s Street begins where the pavements broaden slightly to form an amorphous space known as Cross Square. This marks the final side of the rectangle of streets that constitute the town’s historic heart, framed to the south and east by the Traun and to the north by its tributary, the Ischl.
On this two-hour walk, the traveller is lured by several grand buildings of the nineteenth century: the massive Kurhaus with its long rows of Renaissance windows and French-style gardens; the proud, four-storey Post and Telegraph Office with sculpted façade, mansard windows and a trapezoidal corner tower; and the low, simple Drinking Hall with the gilded capitals of its columns and pilasters. He delights in the imperial atmosphere and the Alpine romanticism radiating from the names of the local guesthouses: Elisabeth Residence, Hotel Golden Ox, Hotel Golden Ship, Salt Mill Guesthouse, Hotel Sun Court, Traun Castle – misread by him as Traumschlössl, “Dream Castle” – and many more.
At the terrace of the Imperial Zauner Confectionery, a Wiener Melange in hand, he puzzles over why the elongated oval display windows and the even more attenuated ovals on the glass doors strike him as vaguely indecent. Do they remind him of the cover of some long-forgotten Austrian erotic novel? Or of the illustrations to a serialised tale of a Viennese courtesan’s life, glimpsed, in his youth, in a risqué magazine? Or is it simply the way the crimson velvet interior and golden-brown cakes reflect sensually from within on those metallic ovals?
Nature, too, tugs at him: the shallow, quick-flowing Traun, its stony bed glinting; the steep 599-metre Siriuskogl, cloaked in mixed forest and crowned with a wooden lookout tower; and, further south-west, Katrin, the queen of the landscape, towering at 1,542 metres. For a resort town of only fourteen thousand inhabitants, this is quite enough to occupy the senses. And yet, just as he begins to think he has seen it all, he comes upon the Emperor’s Street – a street that, despite its modesty, despite his own indifference, despite everything, stirs his imagination more than anything else in Bad Ischl.
The Emperor’s Street still bears the dignity of a former main thoroughfare, despite its central role having long since faded. There is little traffic, few people, most of them locals rather than visitors, though the street neatly connects the Imperial Villa and Savings Bank Square, two of the town’s busiest tourist sights. Architecturally, it is among the most impressive: the ensemble is dominated by a strict, often austere classicism, broken by the butter-yellow façade of the eclectic Hôtel zur Post and marred here and there by graceless twentieth-century additions.
The hotel itself, the street’s most majestic building, sprawling across nearly a third of its length, evokes better than anything else the era when Ischl rose to become one of Europe’s foremost spa towns. Built in 1827–1828, it was the first hotel in the Salzkammergut. Even earlier, wealthy visitors had begun to come to Ischl for saline baths to soothe their ailments – Chancellor Metternich among them, in 1824. Salt had been mined in these mountains for millennia, and in the early Iron Age it had even birthed a high culture – the Hallstatt civilisation, named for a village twenty kilometres south of here – whose influence spread across the Alps, the Danube plain and as far as Iberia and southern Britain. The first mines in Ischl opened in the late sixteenth century, but it was only when salt gained renown for its medicinal properties that the town’s name reached a wider world.
With the arrival of the Habsburgs in the late 1820s, Ischl’s fame soared. Archduchess Sophie, after several miscarriages, gave birth here in 1830 to her first child, the future Emperor Franz Joseph – a miracle attributed to the saline cure. The couple’s four sons were consequently nicknamed the “salt princes”. In 1853, Franz Joseph became engaged in Ischl to Elisabeth of Bavaria, and together they spent many summers here.
Hôtel zur Post often housed their illustrious guests – not only Europe’s high aristocracy but also leading figures in politics, business, and culture: Otto von Bismarck, Theodor Herzl, Lionel Nathan Rothschild and countless artists. Today the four-storey building has been divided into flats and shops, though the façade still bears the inscription Hôtel zur Post. The front has scarcely changed since its 1895 remodelling: balconies with wrought-iron railings divide the façade vertically, while slender pilasters with composite capitals and simple medallions articulate its surface. Yet little stirs in front of it now: a few cars parked, a lone passer-by opening the old wooden door, a single light burning in the evening.
The very silence conjures its heyday more vividly: a slim porter in black livery flinging open the door, another hefting leather trunks, a coach door held ready, a gloved hand extended for assistance, the horses fed and patient, white parasols, imposing beards, hats tipped, whispered rumours of inheritance and politics, the Crimean War, foreign newspapers, staircases draped in red carpet with golden trim, discreet requests, tips pressed into palms…
Entertainment, too, was provided for such exalted guests. At the beginning of the street, in 1826–1827, a small summer theatre was built that soon gained renown across the empire. Its stage hosted Grillparzer’s tragedies, Schnitzler’s psychological dramas, the operas of Rossini and Verdi, and operettas by Offenbach, Strauss the Younger and Lehár – the latter two often conducting themselves. Many of Vienna’s leading actors appeared here, from Johann Nestroy and Alexander Girardi to Richard Tauber and Hans Moser. Since 1940, the theatre has borne Lehár’s name. He spent much of his later life in Bad Ischl, owned a villa, composed The Count of Luxembourg and Gypsy Love here, and now rests in the local cemetery. Today the building houses a cinema.
The theatre itself is modest: its main façade, with a horizontally striped central projection and pediment supported by two pairs of columns, faces Cross Square. The Emperor’s Street façade, once leading to the court boxes, is now obscured by a plain white-brick annex, home to a sports shop and the theatre café. From here, on a Friday or Saturday evening, the traveller may hear the clink of glasses and the folk songs rising and falling, their sudden ebb and flow reminiscent of tea lapping in a small cup.
The guests rise from their tables. The women are dressed in Alpine dirndls – not merely a costume for the tourism trade, as the traveller realises. A green bodice-and-skirt set, he notes in the window of the shop across the street, costs 120 euros.
Other figures who left their mark on Bad Ischl are honoured here as well. At the very start of the Emperor’s Street, on a three-storey classical building, a plaque records that the thirteen-year-old Stefan Zweig stayed here with his parents in September 1895, in what was then called the Athens House. It hails one of the Old World’s most emblematic writers as a “great European”, only afterwards recognising him as the author of novellas, novels, and biographies.
Further along, the parish church of Saint Nicholas bears a plaque noting that Anton Bruckner, the emperor’s court organist, played there on grand occasions: Franz Joseph’s birthdays and the 1890 wedding of his daughter Marie Valerie, when he performed both variations on the imperial anthem and Handel’s “Hallelujah.” Opposite the church, the street opens onto a small square, backed by a three-storey Jugendstil school. Founded in 1908 as the Franz Joseph Boys’ School, it is now named after Johann Nestroy, the playwright and actor who frequented Ischl from 1845, purchased a villa there in 1859, and often performed in the resort theatre. His connection to the school, however, remains unknown.
Opposite the hotel and beside the school stands Café Ramsauer, the town’s oldest café, proudly displaying its honours. Johann Strauss, the Waltz King, is said to have drawn inspiration for several of his “immortal melodies” here. The actor Alexander Girardi was a regular. Another plaque, set by the local operetta societies, commemorates Robert Stolz and quotes from his score for The White Horse Inn. That world-famous operetta, though set in Sankt Wolfgang some fifteen kilometres west, is a constant point of pride throughout the Salzkammergut.
The traveller need not feel embarrassed if he has never heard of it: the romantic title, the richly decorated Alpine houses nearby, his vague familiarity with the empire’s musical theatre, and the locals’ evident pride in everything that has reached the wider world may stir his imagination more profoundly than any definite memory or certain knowledge. Even a mistaken impression can mean more to him than an established fact.
Café Ramsauer might appear to him to be named after Johann Georg Ramsauer, the man who in 1846 uncovered the prehistoric burial site at Hallstatt’s Salt Mountain and directed its first excavations. The image of a Vienna-style café, embracing this remarkable archaeological discovery and following with enthusiasm and pride how the nearby mountains reveal, layer by layer, the traces of a lost civilisation, would seem far more alluring to him than the reality: that the café had already been founded in 1826, and that Ramsauer could not have been its godfather – unless, of course, the café’s name was later changed.
Compared to Zauner, Café Ramsauer is humbler, less imperial, more Alpine. It is not a tourist haunt: prices are modest, locals eat breakfast here, and on Sundays it is closed altogether. Should the traveller reply to the waiter’s “Grüezi” with a casual “Hallo”, he may find himself the object of curious stares – which might feel like censure, perhaps even a whiff of right-wing extremism. But just as likely it is nothing more than the blunt directness so often found among mountain folk.
Further along, wooden notice boards – reminiscent of the roofed grave crosses typical of this region – display club announcements: perhaps an invitation from the mountaineering club to join a free eight-hour climb of a nearby 1,500-metre peak.
At the far end of the Emperor’s Street lies a small park, its corner marked by a Madonna holding the infant Jesus upright, a memorial to the locals who fell in the world wars. The park is named after Rudolf, brother of Emperor Franz I. And so the traveller finds himself back at the point where his walk began.
September–October 2016