Schloss Leopoldskron
Schloss Leopoldskron is a rococo palace and a national historic monument in Leopoldskron-Moos, a southern district of the city of Salzburg, Austria.
He acquired the area between the palace and the Untersberg as a family estate, which he passed on in May 1744 to his nephew Count Laktanz Firmian, who used it to house his large collection of paintings.
George Zierer, the owner of a local shooting gallery, bought the palace and stripped it of most of the valuable interior decorations, including paintings, etchings, and sculptures.
During the same year, Hermann Göring assigned the palace to Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, an Austrian who had been spying for the Nazis in Britain and Europe and who had many influential contacts.
Once it came to light that Stephanie von Hohenlohe may have been a double agent, she fled to England, then America, returning the palace to Nazi hands until the end of the war.
In 1946 Helene Thimig, the widow of Max Reinhardt, offered use of the palace to Clemens Heller, who founded the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies, a "Marshall Plan of the Mind," together with Scott Elledge and Richard Campbell, all Harvard graduate students.
[5] The Salzburg Seminar brought together young people from the countries that had been in conflict during World War 2 and originally offered education on American history, art, literature and culture, in a period when United States armed forces occupied parts of Germany and Austria.
[9] Notable hotel guests have included Prince Charles, Bill Gates, Kofi Annan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and many more.
[10] In 1964, the film The Sound of Music, directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Andrews, was produced in Salzburg with the grounds of Schloss Leopoldskron as one of the main exterior locations.
[citation needed] 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 gardens of the palace.
The 1987 special production of the "Sound of Christmas" starring Julie Andrews, John Denver, and Plácido Domingo was also filmed at the Schloss Leopoldskron.
