The sacred and the profane

I told my mother that I was going to be Catholic while I was in Salzburg. I mean, why not? There are loads of beautiful Catholic churches here to choose from, each with glorious architecture, a noble past, and besides which, there has been an enormous amount of music written for the Mass. Today I went to the Dom for high Mass at 10 o'clock.
For those of you who are interested in such things, the Dom is where Mozart was baptized and it also features prominently as the church where Maria and the captain are wed in "The Sound of Music." Here is a link.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Dom_Salzburg.jpg

The photo is taken from just about exactly where I sat this morning. The color is a little washed out, so you will have to mentally ramp it up a couple of notches.
On deck musically this morning was a cathedral choir (and orchestra!) from Switzerland offering Muffat's Missa in Labore Requies. I am grateful for my background as a high church Episcopalian and as a teacher at a Catholic school for many years as I was able to sing, stand, sit and kneel at the appropriate times. It was also helpful because I could translate the language in the standard responses. I got really good at "Und mit deine Geiste" ("and with thy spirit")
I need to take a quick aside here and mention that my German is improving, but not at the rate I would like. Most people in the German speaking word have their own dialects and the Austrian one takes some acclimation. The first priest this morning spoke in hoch Deutsch (high German) which I was relieved to find I could understand, followed by lay readers who spoke in dialect. It sounds a bit like.... forgive me..... yodelling. The sermon was given in hoch Deutsch, so I got a lot of that, and there was a greeting given by a visiting priest in French. Apparently the visiting choir was from a part of Switzerland that speaks French.
The music itself was beautiful......kind of. Where I was sitting there was a lot of delay. Because the space is SO massive, the sound never quite comes together. It goes up into the dome and out into the transcept and meets itself on the way back. The conductor used massive gestures to keep everything together and I'm sure he felt like he'd had an aerobic workout when he was finished.
That being said, there is nothing quite as thrilling as being in a packed cathedral with choir, orchestra, pealing bells and my all time favorite, incense. It was spectacular and made my little high church heart go pitty pat.
I mentioned before that the Dom was the scene of Maria's wedding in "The Sound of Music" and as such, is a high point on the Sound of Music tour. There is of course more than one tour, and at any given point in time, a busload of movie fans will show up. In spite of the numerous signs posted that a Mass was being said and PLEASE do not enter, there were many unconcerned tourists wandering to and fro during the Mass. It would have been less disturbing had they kept off to the side or stayed in the back, but they wandered about like grazing water buffalo in their jeans and sneakers. I might add here that I have seen a lot of traditional garb here in Austria, far more than in Germany. Apparently Sunday is the day to wear it as the lector was in a dirndl as were many other members of the congregation.
The other people I saw wandering about were the homeless or mentally impaired. I have seen quite a bit of that here, something that surprises me rather. It's not unusual to be at a bus stop or walking along the street and to come upon a person rocking back and forth speaking gibberish or yelling at the pigeons. I've seen several women clutching bedraggled stuffed animals as well. There were a couple of people begging on the church steps, all of whom looked as if they were down on their luck, or hanging on to a thin tether to reality. I guess in the States we don't see so much of that for whatever reason.
After this beautiful liturgy, I stepped out into the square to the sounds of a polka band. The annual BioFest was being held in the church square. It's an open air market featuring organic products. In a bizarre twist of logic, the longest lines were for the deep fried items. A bit counter-productive, don't you agree?

I find it amusing that after purifying your soul, you can step outside into the square and gunk it all up again.