The Story of the Trapp Family Singers
Page 34
We all felt the greatness of this hour, and willingly we accepted the new challenge. Werner, who usually rather listens than speaks, took the word then and summed it up for all of us.
“Let us take this first Christian community for our example. Let us have no private property, but share everything together as they did. And let us feel obliged, every one of us, to keep a quiet half hour in which we shall daily meditate on the life of Christ, that we may imitate it better and better.”
That was the beginning of “Cor unum,” and the end of the “Trapp Family” as an entity. It was a great and memorable moment in which we learned that the Trapp Family Singers had by now become an institution whose existence does not depend on the members of the closest family any more. It had been our mission to present a certain type of the best unknown music performed in a certain way to the multitudes near and far. More and more often it had happened that people, older ones and younger ones, who liked that particular spirit, wanted to be “adopted” into the family. The family ties have proved to be elastic, and so the family has grown and is still growing. If it now happens that one of these new members can even contribute with his voice, so much the better.
Our hill has become a holy hill for us since it contains that hallowed space with a lone grave, covered with flowers, framed by mountains, overshadowed by a large wooden Cross. From there silently, but still so eloquently, the head of the family watches over his own.
There we go through the year together, celebrating the feasts and the fasts as we were used to doing in the old home. Many of the old folk customs have been transplanted to the new world, much to the joy of the friends of Cor Unum.
As the weeks, the months, the years go by, we see more and more that only one thing is necessary to be happy and to make others happy, and that one thing is not money, nor connections, nor health—it is love. That love about which Saint Paul breaks out in his famous canticle of praise:
“Love is patient, is kind…. It does not envy…is not ambitious, is not self-seeking, is not provoked, thinks no evil…bears with all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.”
And the author of The Imitation of Christ continues:
“Love is an excellent thing and a very great blessing, indeed. It makes every difficulty easy. It bears a burden without being weighted, and renders sweet all that is bitter. Love knows no limits, feels no burden, thinks nothing of troubles, attempts more than it is able, because it believes that it may and can do all things; for this reason it is able to do all, performing much where he who does not love fails and falls. Love is watchful. Sleeping, it does not slumber. Like a living flame, a burning torch, it tends upward and passes unharmed through every obstacle.”
Whatever faults may be committed, big or small, whatever clouds may pile up on the horizon, dark and threatening, love will overcome all.
“Who seeks for heaven alone to save his soul,
May keep the path, but will not reach the goal;
While he who walks in love may wander far,
Yet God will bring him where the blessed are.*
Herein lies the hope of all those who belong to
Cor Unum.
About the Author
With nearly 1,500 Broadway performances, six Tony Awards, more than three million albums sold, and five Academy Awards, The Sound of Music, based on the lives of Maria, the baron, and their singing children, is as familiar to most of us as our own family history. But much about the real-life woman and her family was left untold.
Here, Baroness Maria Augusta Trapp tells in her own beautiful, simple words the extraordinary story of her romance with the baron, their escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, and their life in America.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
Readers and Reviewers All Sing the Praises of This Delightful Book!
“Told with such wonderful skill that it compels interest from the first page until the last. It is an absorbing and fascinating human document…especially timely in its significance for our days when family life is becoming a thing to be remembered rather than to be lived. It presents a real example of a family in which Christian traditions and Christian faith illumine and enliven every event…has everything the reader can require in a good story—entertainment, inspiration and enough to think about after the book has been laid aside.”
Brooklyn Tablet
“This book not only moved me sometimes to tears—it also made me laugh a lot…. If a book can make one weep and laugh—what more can one ask?”
Lotte Lehmann
“Thoroughly entertaining personal history of a woman worth meeting and worth knowing. Maria and her book will make a friend of you in the first half-dozen paragraphs, and keep you as a friend to the final page. You’re missing something if you don’t get hold of it right away.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“Engrossing, humorous, poignant.”
Boston Traveler
A mother: “It makes me tackle my homemaker’s job with renewed vigor and love.”
“Like no other book we have read…an altogether charming picture of family life.”
Worcester Sunday Telegram
A businesswoman: “Delightful story, charmingly written, and has a lot of humor and good common sense.”
Credits
Cover design by Claire Williams
Cover photograph courtesy of the Trapp Family
Copyright
Photographs without credits are courtesy of the Trapp family.
THE STORY OF THE TRAPP FAMILY SINGERS. Copyright © 1949 by Maria Augusta Trapp. Copyright © renewed 1980 by Trapp Family Lodge, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First Perennial edition published 2002.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Trapp, Maria Augusta.
The story of the Trapp Family Singers / Maria Augusta Trapp.—1st Perennial ed.
p. cm.
Previously published: New York : Doubleday, 1990.
ISBN 0-06-000577-7 ISBN 978-0-06-000577-1
1. Trapp Family Singers. 2. Folk singers—Biography. I. Title.
ML421.T7 T7 2001
782.5’092’2—dc21
[B]
2001036960
EPub Edition © FEBRUARY 2011 ISBN: 978-0-06-209197-0
05 06
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* All quotations from the Bible are translated from the German.
* From The Story of the Other Wise Man by Henry Van Dyke. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Brothers.