Leopoldskron Palace - Salzburg

Leopoldskron Palace is located on Leopoldskronstraße in Salzburg, Austria. The rococo palace dates to 1736, when it was built for Count Leopold Anton Eleutherius von Firmian, the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg. After the archbishop’s death his heart was placed in the palace’s chapel. The palace remained in the Firmian family for one hundred years before it was sold, and subsequently went through several owners before it was purchased by theatre impresario Max Reinhardt in 1918. Reinhardt spent the next twenty years restoring the palace to its original glory, refurbishing the entire structure, along with creating new rooms, including a theatre, which he used for his productions. During his time here he co-founded the Salzburg Festival in 1920 and managed the Theater in der Josefstadt in Vienna from 1924 to 1933.  In 1938 the Jewish born Reinhardt fled Austria after it was annexed by Nazi Germany.  In 1939, during a period when the Nazis were re-appropriating Jewish property, the palace was confiscated and later occupied by Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, an Austrian born German spy, who knew Reinhardt from the pre-war days. Through connections she was able to get most of his possessions shipped to him in New York, where he was living, and would eventually die in 1943.  Hohenlohe would later flee to England under suspicion of being a double agent.  The palace, however, remained in German hands until 1946, when it was returned to Helene Thimig, Reinhardt’s widow. In 1959 the palace was purchased by the Salzburg Global Seminar and in 2014, after years of major renovations, it opened as the Hotel Schloss Leopoldskron. In popular culture the palace is best remembered as a shooting location for the 1965 film The Sound of Music. While scenes for the front of the Von Trapp home were shot at nearby Schloss Frohnburg, scenes of the back of the Von Trapp home were shot here at Leopolskron and views of it from across the pond are clearly seen in the film. While both palaces were used to create a composite villa for the film, neither had any real life association with the family or their home.

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