Stephen Harding - The Last Battle

Though ostensibly men of both God and peace, the bishops of Regensburg were also princes of the Holy Roman Empire. As temporal rulers the bishops were often heavy-handed and needlessly severe, and Schloss Itter saw frequent service as a base from which the bishops launched punitive expeditions against their sorely oppressed subjects. Though Tyrol came under Hapsburg rule in 1363, Schloss Itter and the nearby village remained within the ecclesiastical control of the Regensburg bishops until 1380, when Bishop Konrad VI von Haimberg sold them to the archbishop of Salzburg—Pilgrim II of Puchein—for 26,000 Hungarian guilders.

Looted and partially destroyed during the 1515–1526 Tyrolean peasant uprising, [5] Led by social and political reformer Michael Gaismayr, the revolt sought to replace the church-dominated feudal system with a republic. While successful in several military engagements against reactionary forces, Gaismayr and his followers were defeated at Radstadt in July 1526. Gaismayr fled to Venice and ultimately Padua, where on April 15, 1532, he was assassinated by Austrian agents. Schloss Itter was rebuilt beginning in 1532. For the last few years of the sixteenth century, the fortress was home to an ecclesiastical court charged with suppressing witchcraft in the region, and local legend holds that in 1590 the last witch to be burned in the Tyrol met her end on a pyre in the schloss’s main courtyard. [6] See Augusta Léon-Jouhaux, Prison pour hommes d’Etat , 23. As noted later in this volume, she was labor leader León Jouhaux’s secretary, companion, and future wife and was imprisoned with him at Itter from 1943 to 1945. It is also at about this time—and most probably at the order of those whose job it was to root out witches—that the famous phrase from Dante’s fourteenth-century epic poem Divine Comedy was first inscribed, in German, on the wall above the doors leading to Schloss Itter’s vaulted entranceway: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”

The castle changed hands several times over the following two and a half centuries, and by 1782 was part of the personal lands of Joseph II, who had become Holy Roman emperor two years earlier following the death of his mother, Hapsburg empress Maria Theresa. So fond was Joseph of his Tyrolean fortress that when Pope Pius VI journeyed to Austria shortly after Joseph’s ascension to the throne, the monarch insisted that the pope consecrate the altar in Schloss Itter’s small but exquisite chapel. The pope did so—mainly in an attempt to heal a rift between Joseph and the church—and also left behind at the castle an ornate Gothic crucifix and other ecclesiastical treasures.

Despite his fondness for Schloss Itter, Joseph II—like most of the castle’s previous owners—chose to live elsewhere. In late December 1805 he was replaced by another, though admittedly far grander, absentee landlord, Napoléon Bonaparte. The diminutive French emperor gained title to the schloss as a result of the Treaty of Pressburg, which followed his victories over Austria at Ulm and Austerlitz, in mid-October and early December 1805, respectively. Bonaparte did not long retain title, however, for in 1809 he presented Schloss Itter to his loyal ally King Maximilian I of Bavaria. [7] Until his coronation in 1806 the king had been styled Maximilian IV Josef, prince-elector of Bavaria. The latter did little to ensure the upkeep of his new fortress, and, when in 1812 the councilors of Itter village offered Maximilian the relatively paltry sum of 15 Austro-Hungarian guldens for the entire edifice, the king accepted with alacrity. The villagers in fact had no intention of rehabilitating Schloss Itter; they intended it merely to be a source of construction materials. Over the following decades stones from the castle’s walls and wooden beams from its interior were used to build the village gasthaus and various other structures.

The castle remained in disrepair even after Tyrol returned to Austrian rule following the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna. But in 1878 the obviously canny village government sold the schloss—by that time little more than a scenic ruin—for an impressive 3,000 guldens to a Munich-based entrepreneur named Paul Spiess, who planned to turn it into a large and presumably very exclusive inn. The would-be hotelier launched a comprehensive renovation, ultimately giving Schloss Itter a central, multistory housing wing with fifty guest rooms, backed by a taller keep-like structure and flanked by smaller wings containing kitchens, servants’ quarters, and storage areas. Spiess also repaired the encircling walls, rebuilt the crumbling gatehouse, landscaped the ravine, and repaved the narrow, 150-yard-long road between the castle and the village. Despite Spiess’s investment, the hotel ultimately failed, and in 1884 the disappointed businessman sold the property to one of Europe’s most acclaimed—and beautiful—musicians, the famed German piano virtuoso and composer Sophie Menter.

Born in Munich in 1846, Menter was something of a prodigy. The child of talented musicians—her father was a cellist and her mother a singer—she played her first public concert while still in her teens. At the age of twenty-three she became a student of Franz Liszt, who often referred to her as his “piano daughter” and ultimately declared her to be the world’s finest living female pianist. In 1872 she married the Bohemian cellist David Popper, with whom she toured for several years. Menter’s purchase [8] Menter apparently purchased the castle using funds she’d earned on the concert circuit, though a brief article in the Nov. 25, 1885, edition of the New York Times (“Mme. Menter’s Good Fortune”) indicated that the purchase was largely financed by 400,000 rubles left to her in the will of an elderly Russian admirer. of Castle Itter was the culmination of a long-held desire for a stately home that would serve as both a private refuge from the rigors of her professional life and a salon for other musicians, and she refurbished several of the ground-floor rooms for use as practice areas and small performance spaces.

Over the eighteen years that Menter owned Castle Itter, she hosted such notable musical guests as Richard Wagner and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and her friend and mentor Liszt was a frequent and very welcome visitor. Indeed, so welcome was he that his several visits always commenced with ceremonial cannon salutes, and his passage up the approach road took him beneath flower-bedecked triumphal arches. While Liszt enjoyed these grand gestures, he used his time as Menter’s guest to work. During a visit in November 1885, for example, he arose each morning at four, worked steadily for three hours, took a brief pause to attend Mass in the castle’s chapel, and then went back to work until midafternoon. [9] Ibid. In letters to Menter he was deeply appreciative of the time he’d spent at her “fairy-like” castle, referring to his time there as “magic memories.” [10] Liszt, La Mara, and Bache, From Rome to the End , 377.

Sophie Menter continued to live at Castle Itter following the end of her marriage to Popper in 1886, and she often used the schloss for public events such as her October 1891 benefit performance to support the new choral society forming in the market town of Wörgl, four miles to the northwest of the schloss. She also continued to provide a creative atmosphere for famous visitors. During one two-week visit in September 1892, Tchaikovsky most probably scored Menter’s “Ungarische Zigeunerweisen,” a seventeen-minute work for piano and orchestra based on Hungarian Gypsy melodies that Menter and Tchaikovsky premiered in St. Petersburg, Russia, in February 1893.

Sadly, the costs of keeping up the aging structure forced Menter to sell Schloss Itter in 1902. [11] Menter returned to Germany after the castle’s sale and lived near Munich for the remainder of her life. She died on Feb. 23, 1918. The buyer was one Eugen Mayr of Berlin, a wealthy physician and entrepreneur who equipped parts of the structure with electric lighting and had modern plumbing installed in the kitchens and primary living areas. Mayr used the castle as a suitably majestic venue for his August 1904 wedding to Maria Kunert, and he then spent several years and a small fortune giving the structure a neo-Gothic facelift. The addition of crenellated battlements and extensive interior woodwork—as well as the installation of several huge paintings depicting various stirring scenes from German mythology—left the castle with the fairytale look so popular during the first years of the twentieth century, which allowed Herr Mayr and his bride to achieve some success operating Itter as a boutique hotel.