Thomas Bernhard, Gathering Evidence. The Austrian novelist's brutal childhood memoir is set largely in wartime and postwar Salzburg, and skewers the city's self-image as a place of music and beauty. A useful corrective to any Sound of Music sentimentality.
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday. Zweig — Austria's most translated writer in the 1920s — lived for years on the Kapuzinerberg and wrote some of his best work there. His memoir captures the lost cultural world from which the Salzburg Festival emerged.
Maria von Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers. The real memoir behind The Sound of Music — more interesting than the film, with much more about the family's musical training and considerably less about romance.
Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Mozart. A serious, sometimes provocative critical biography that strips away the cherubic-genius mythology built up around Mozart in his birthplace. Best read after a day at the Geburtshaus.
Friedrich Torberg, Tante Jolesch. Not specifically about Salzburg, but a comic portrait of the vanished Austrian-Jewish coffeehouse culture that puts the city's pre-war musical world in context.