Hellbrunn Palace

This guide to Hellbrunn Palace's mechanical theatre in Salzburg follows Lorenz Rosenegger, a salt miner who in July seventeen forty-eight proposed replacing an old water-driven forge with a stage of moving figures, spending four years hiding waterwheels and cogwheels behind a miniature Baroque town. It traces how the court music director Johann Ernst Eberlin later tuned a water-powered organ to the same mechanism, and how the figures sort themselves by rank, nobles nodding slowly while workers hammer and shave without pause. Stand close to the stage rather than at the railing to catch the smallest figures.