This is Austria [antikvár]

MEMORIES OF AUSTRIA ARE VIVID AND COLOUR-ful and always seem as if accompanied by music. Sometimes we fancy we can hear the dreamy tinkling of the bronze cow-bells on the sun-clad foothills, stippled with gay Alpine flowers, or we hear the bubbling of a foaming mountain stream, the rushing of a waterfall or the whining of the wind through the tops of a dark forest . . .A country of music. The Salzburg Festival is known the world over, so are the Viennese opera, the great orchestras, the choirs, including the Vienna Boys Choir. Where in the world have so many musical geniuses been born or inspired as in this small country with the history of a world empire, wedged between the frontiers of the nations of the west, the south, the east and the middle of Europe ? The traveller is constantly being reminded of them: here Mozart lived and worked', here Haydn, Gluck, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, Strauss And yet it is not only the orchestras and choirs, or the memories of composers, that evoke thoughts of music in this country. There is music in the architecture too: the genial beauty of cathedrals and abbeys, of castles and palaces, of government buildings and burghers' houses overlooking squares and streets that have witnessed the passing of more imposing processions than the modern stream of tourists . . .But perhaps it is also, or even primarily, the rhythmical pattern of the Eastern Alps themselves that strike us as being akin to music, lyrical or dramatic, joyous or grave, and always beautiful. It is the broken line of the mountain ridges, rising steeply to lonely, eternally white peaks, the interplay between golden valleys and grey, weathered rock faces, between fresh meadows or bright corn-fields and dark wooded slopes, between the grim mineral stone and the white chalk cliffsthe peace of the blue lakes midst the enthralling suspense of the wild mass of rock.5