By the way...

Don’t Cry for Me Argentina

(Bild: AP)

"Krone Vorarlberg" author Harald Petermichl went in search of mausoleums for the latest edition of his column "Oh, by the way...". While he quickly found what he was looking for in Styria, he had a hard time in the west. Almost as difficult in Argentina. But a remedy is now being found there - we can only hope that Andrew Lloyd Webber doesn't get any stupid ideas.

For someone who lives in Styria, the matter is quite simple. If the urge to visit a mausoleum cannot be tamed, there are three alternatives to choose from on a rainy weekend: the Mausoleum of Emperor Ferdinand II in the provincial capital, the Ehrenhausen Mausoleum and the Habsburg Mausoleum in the market town of Seckau. Only Lower Austria can keep up to a certain extent with three other options, but towards the west it gets really dark and - as we all know, Austria is wide - you have to travel long distances to pay your respects to long-dead celebrities in their posthumous homes.

Argentine wasteland
This is even more difficult on the American continent, because although there is the Bob Marley mausoleum in Nine Miles, the Che Guevara mausoleum in Santa Clara, Cuba, and a handful of other such magnificent buildings, Argentina, for example, has nothing to offer its almost 50 million inhabitants in this respect. This is set to change quickly, as a court in San Isidro decided a few days ago that Diego Armando Maradona Franco's mortal remains will be transferred from the private cemetery Jardin Bella Vista to the specially erected "Memorial del Diez" (memorial to number 10) mausoleum on the Explanada del Bajo, a wide green strip next to a highway right next to the presidential palace (where Maradona's body was laid out in 2020), at the end of the month.

Is there now a threat of a musical?
Well, if it's as important to Maradona's daughters Dalma and Gianinna as it is to his former partner Veronica Ojeda, who appealed to the court for this purpose, then so be it, After all, there is already something similar in football-mad and football-worshipping South America in the form of the Pelé Mausoleum in Santos, Brazil, even if it is located in a fourteen-storey high-rise cemetery called the "Memorial Necropole Ecumenica" and is not a magnificent, purpose-built structure. However, there is a deep-seated worry that the inevitable Andrew Lloyd Webber, who makes a musical out of anything that's not up to scratch and who has already made a mess of Argentinean material with "Evita", will get some silly ideas. Because a three-hour musical with the title "Hand of God" would really not be what the music world has been waiting for in vain.