While the von Trapps feel no animosity toward the film, they do resent the fact that, in the play and film versions, Maria is the one who is put on the pedestal while their father is given little credit for inspiring his children’s talents and ideas.
“Part of the problem was that the Broadway play was written to be a vehicle for a star, Mary Martin, and so the character was made to be more important,” said Johannes, the youngest of all Maria’s children and president of the Trapp Family Lodge.
Father Wasner, who played such a large role in the family’s history, was left out of the play version entirely, to which the family also objected. But they were even more incensed when his character turned up again in the film as Max Detweiler. The priest and his film character, Max, couldn’t have been more different.
The von Trapps all realize that the play and movies are fictional accounts of their lives, and on some level, they even enjoy the movie. But they are all adamant about the fact that this is not their story. In fact, the children have a somewhat darker view of their family history, as compared to their mother’s portrayal in her books.
According to the children, the von Trapp story began in 1910, when a distinguished naval commander, Georg von Trapp, met Agathe Whitehead at a ball. It was love at first sight and, in society’s eyes, almost a royal match. Captain von Trapp was as distinguished a war commander as, say, Eisenhower was in America after World War II. The marriage between von Trapp and Agathe Whitehead, whose father had invented the torpedo, had the same mythical trappings as John and Jackie Kennedy’s. And they were very rich. Whitehead had inherited money from her family, and the von Trapps lived off the interest.
The first blow to the Captain’s way of life came when the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke up after World War I. Austria no longer had an ocean, so naturally it no longer needed a navy, and the Captain lost his post. Then, when the Captain’s wife died, he was devastated. But Johannes von Trapp thinks the end of his naval career was as severe a blow to his father as the loss of his wife.
“My father’s forte was the navy,” explained Johannes. “He was uncomfortable doing anything else. He was sort of lost.”
After their mother died, the children had a number of governesses. One would be hired for the older children, one for the younger, and one to run the household. The children wanted to have just one governess, and Maria seemed to be perfect. But, while Maria brought madrigals and other complicated music into the family, the children were far from musical novices. They sang all the time. And the Captain encouraged them to sing. He even joined them, playing the guitar, mandolin, and violin. When the Captain lost his fortune after the Austrian national bank folded, the children had to learn how to work, doing laundry and other household chores. They looked at their misfortune as an adventure, but the Captain was hit hard by the loss. He had nine children to support and suddenly had no money.
When his family began to earn money by singing onstage, the Captain faced another blow. “It wasn’t singing onstage that bothered my father so much,” said Johannes. “It was that they were getting paid to sing onstage. In his position in society working on stage for money was déclassé.”
Maria, along with Father Wasner, brought a level of sophistication to the family’s singing, but according to Johannes, the Captain’s naval stature helped the family forge their careers. Even before they began singing the Captain was very well known, and his name lent a certain air of importance to their singing group. But even with his name attached to the group, the Captain sat by himself backstage while his family performed. As head of the family he would come out and introduce the group after they had performed a few numbers, and then at the end of the show he would come back out onstage and take a bow.
Then Hitler invaded Austria. The Captain pulled his family to his side and said, “We are standing at the open grave of Austria.” He asked them if they wanted to stay or to leave. They made their choice. It was a terrible blow to leave their home and all their belongings behind, and then, when they learned that Himmler had taken over their house, the grief was almost unbearable.
The von Trapps arrived in America in 1938 and until 1956 spent their entire lives on the road, giving tours. But because they traveled so much, the children basically had to put their personal lives on hold.
“Those years that we sang were not easy,” said Johannes. “We traveled around the world and gave many concerts. But at each stop, my mother always made sure we went to this nunnery and that nunnery. So, with every concert we gave, there was often a free concert that we performed afterwards. I didn’t think it was so hard. I was ten, twelve years old at the time, but for my older brothers and sisters, it must have been difficult.”
Maria would never hear of any of them leaving the family to go out on their own, even after some of them married and had a family. “My mother had tremendous strengths,” said Johannes, “but she had characteristics that also made her very difficult. She wanted us to perform a hundred ten percent of our capacity all the time, but she demanded that of herself as well.”
Von Trapps performing in 1938.
Maria also seemed to have violent opposing forces inside of her that would sometimes cause her to lash out at her family. Some of the children think this stemmed from the fact that Maria had a hard time trying to subjugate her own interests to God’s will. She tried to do what she felt God wanted her to do, but she also wanted what was important to her.
When the Captain died on May 30, 1947, the children began to rebel. They were tired of living their lives on the road. They wanted to start families and settle down. Rosmarie, the eldest of Maria’s own children, ran away from home at the age of eighteen. She was brought home by Father Wasner but never traveled with the family again. Johanna, the second to the youngest of the original children, ran away and got married, against Maria’s wishes. The other children eventually broke away, and the family stopped touring in 1956. Then the family corporation bought a ranch in Montana. Johannes was the only one who ever stayed there. The siblings communicated more after Maria died and found that they shared the same feelings. They all felt that their father, not just Maria, fostered their talent.
The von Trapp family photographed in 1941. From left: Rupert (sitting), Hedwig, Johannes (on mother’s lap), Maria von Trapp, Johanna, Captain Georg von Trapp, Rosmarie with her arm around Maria, Martina, Werner, Agathe (petting dog), and Eleonore (Lorli, sitting).
Yet Johannes remembers one moment when Hedwig, who died in 1972, came up to her brother and quietly admitted, “You know, Johannes, if it weren’t for mother, we’d have all been cooks and maids.”
Maria was a very complex woman. “She had a very unhappy youth,” explained her youngest son. “It pained her to talk about her childhood.”
In a film that is shown at the Trapp Family Lodge, Maria reveals a little of that pain. She recalls, “I grew up without being kissed. It was just not a habit in [my foster mother’s] house. And then I came here to this house, and one of the little ones, Johanna—she was seven years old—she spontaneously came up to me one day, put her hands around my neck, and kissed me. I remember the sensation very well. It was the first conscious kiss of my life.”
Maria’s ruthlessness sometimes stemmed from her own generosity. “My mother helped thousands of people,” said Johannes, “and if mountains had to be moved to help someone, she would move them. That’s partly what caused people to have a strong reaction toward her. But she never did any of that selfishly. Her positives were as extreme as her negatives.”
Maria, children, and grandchildren in home library in Stowe, Vermont, 1958.
A small example of Maria’s generosity was the Trapp Family Austrian Relief Fund. After the war Maria arranged for hundreds of tons of food and clothing to be shipped overseas. “I was in Austria a few years ago,” said Johannes. “We were sitting in a restaurant, and the owner, an older lady, came up to me and said, ‘You know, if it weren’t for your mother, I wouldn’t be alive today.’”
&
nbsp; Yet Maria never spoke of her own benevolence. “My mother believed that when you did a good deed you shouldn’t talk about it,” said Johannes.
Maria died in 1987 at the age of eighty-two and now rests alongside her husband on their property in Vermont. That young woman who rang a magical steeple bell and wished that she could express her faith and love on paper ended up writing five books about her life and her family. And, along with running the family hostel in Vermont, she also lectured around the world.
Maria’s life was complicated. She wasn’t as pure as Julie Andrews’s version of her, nor as pious as the nuns she had once hoped to emulate at the Nonnberg Abbey. She was, like the rest of us, just human. But she leaves a legacy of love and hope and family loyalty—traits to which we can all aspire. And finally, she will always be remembered as that will-o’-the-wisp whose story inspired The Sound of Music, a timeless motion picture about the remarkable faith and love that created a courageous and extraordinary family.
Maria and Georg.
A Von Trapp Update
Oldest to Youngest
RUPERT: Medical doctor until the mid-1980s. He died in 1992 at the age of eighty, leaving six children and ten grandchildren.
AGATHE: Lived near Baltimore, Maryland, where she worked as a kindergarten teacher. She died in 2010. In her autobiography, Memories Before and After The Sound of Music, Agathe said about the movie, “A very nice story but not our story. If they hadn’t used our name, I probably would have enjoyed it.”
MARIA: Spent thirty years as a missionary in New Guinea. She lived until age ninety-nine, passing in February of 2014.
WERNER: After leaving the family group he preferred to live away from the lodge and became a dairy farmer. He died in 1992.
HEDWIG: Worked at the lodge until her death in 1972.
JOHANNA: Married in 1948, she left the family group to live in Vienna. She had six children and died in Vienna in 1994.
MARTINA: Sang with the group until 1952, when she married. Died in childbirth.
ROSMARIE: The oldest of Maria’s natural-born children, Rosmarie had a very complicated relationship with her mother. She felt that Maria favored her older stepchildren more than her own. Suffering from shyness and massive stage fright, Rosmarie refused to continue touring after her father died. She never married but she did become a loyal companion to her mother after Maria suffered several strokes. And before Maria died, they were able to repair their relationship.
ELEONORE (LORLI): Mother of seven children. Stopped singing in 1952. Now spends time with her children and ten grandchildren.
JOHANNES: The youngest of the von Trapp children, Johannes is a graduate of Dartmouth with a master’s degree in forestry from Yale. He is president of Trapp Family Lodge, Inc., and has two children.
8
“Till You Find Your Dream …”
MUSIC-MANIA
One fan from Oregon saw the movie so many times he sent the producers a copy of the script he’d written from memory. David Campbell, a Denver truck driver, watched the film from the same seat in the same theater every Sunday for three years and then, when the theater closed down, bought the seat. Manila moviegoers almost started a riot in their frenzy to get tickets and did not calm down until police arrived.
What was it about this movie that turned normal, well-adjusted moviegoers into compulsive Music-maniacs? What made the movie so popular that, in 1989, twenty-four years after it opened, the People’s Choice Awards voted The Sound of Music one of the top three favorite motion pictures of all time?
“Everything in it is nice and homey and bread-and-butter and simple,” Richard Haydn told reporter Joan Barthel in an interview for a New York Times piece in 1966.
Ernest Lehman explained his theory to Barthel: “It’s a fantasy about a world which no longer exists, where everything comes out right in the end…. Our astronauts have succeeded in getting out of this world, but those who haven’t go to see The Sound of Music one more time.”
One longtime fan, who was six years old when the movie came out, explained, “The movie seems to touch every adult emotion. You feel love, fear, parental love, patriotism. It’s fifteen movies rolled into one!”
Another fan, who was seventeen years old in 1965 and still watches the film with her family every Christmas, states: “For me, more than anything else, the movie is about values. The family takes a stand for what they believe in and measures everything against their own principles.”
For years, Robert Wise received fan mail from all over the world. His eclectic following ranged from film students writing theses on the movie to nuns seeking autographs.
There has never been a movie that has garnered such repeat business as Music. A Los Angeles woman went to see Music fifty-eight times; a sailor in Puerto Rico, seventy-seven times; and in 1988 Myra Franklin, a forty-seven-year-old widow from Wales, was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for having seen The Sound of Music 940 times!
According to a Variety survey, in 1965 Music became the number-one box-office hit of the year. By Christmas 1965, it edged past Gone With the Wind (by slightly less than $1 million) to become the number-one film of all time. Music kept that title until 1970, when a rerelease of Gone With the Wind made that film reigning champ once again. Music then held out at number two until 1972, when The Godfather won the number-one spot, GWTW came in second, and Music was listed as the third most popular box-office attraction. In the following year, when Music was rereleased in the theaters, the movie moved up to number two (The Godfather still held the number-one title).
In 1975, Steven Spielberg took over Hollywood, and Jaws became the number-one boxoffice film, and each succeeding year, it seemed another Steven Spielberg/George Lucas film would be released, and Music would be pushed down a little farther. But according to Business Insider, in 2016, if one adjusted for inflation The Sound of Music comes in as the third largest grossing movie of all time, behind the 1977 Star Wars (#2) and Gone With the Wind (#1).
In 1976 Music aired on ABC-TV. The network paid $15 million for the rights to show the movie one time only, and its airing rated number one in the Nielsen’s despite the film’s having been shortened by thirty-one minutes. It also placed eighth among the ten top-rated films ever shown on TV. That opened the door for NBC, which in 1978 bought the rights to show the film twenty-two times over a twenty-year period. Even in the new millennium, Music is shown every year on television, either on Easter or around Christmas. Every anniversary, 20th Century Fox releases a new edition of the movie which includes the latest technological advancements.
Not long after the movie was released, The Sound of Music tours began in Salzburg, Austria, and quickly became big business. One company with such events, Panorama Tours and Travel, has been giving tours since the early 1970s. Guests enjoy a four-hour tour of all the sights that were featured in the movie while a live guide leads sing-alongs and explains the details of shooting from spots such as Maria’s Mountain and Mirabell Gardens.
Speaking of sing-alongs, the newest, most exciting sensation to pack the houses in theaters worldwide is the Sound of Music Sing-Along. The event started in London, spread all over Europe, reached New York, and now is a yearly event at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. Thousands of fans show up wearing foam rubber nun’s hats or lederhosen. They’re costumed as goat herders, von Trapp “children,” or perhaps a “wild goose with the moon on her wings.” They’re encouraged to “wave your Edelweiss,” sing along to the subtitles, and boo at the Nazis. There are costume competitions and choreographed hand movements that go along with the songs; the audience is even given gift bags. It’s a campy, joyous celebration of everyone’s favorite film.
People can speculate as to why The Sound of Music was such a success. Each viewer has his or her own personal, subjective answer. But perhaps there are no logical reasons for what we feel in our hearts. Maybe Wise summed it up way back in 1966 when he told Joan Barthel of the New York Times: “I wasn’t trying to say a damn thing in Sound o
f Music. … People just feel good when they see it.”
Cast
Maria
Captain von Trapp
The Baroness (Elsa Schraeder)
Max Detweiler
Mother Abbess
Liesl
Louisa
Friedrich
Kurt
Brigitta
Marta
Gretl
Sister Margaretta
Sister Berthe
Herr Zeller
Rolf
Frau Schmidt
Franz
Sister Sophia
Sister Bernice
Baroness Elberfeld Julie Andrews
Christopher Plummer
Eleanor Parker
Richard Haydn
Peggy Wood
Charmian Carr
Heather Menzies
Nicholas Hammond
Duane Chase
Angela Cartwright
Debbie Turner
Kym Karath
Anna Lee
Portia Nelson
Ben Wright
Daniel Truhitte
Norma Varden
Gil Stuart
Marni Nixon
Evadne Baker
Doris Lloyd
Crew
Director/Producer: Robert Wise
Associate Producer: Saul Chaplin
Screenwriter: Ernest Lehman
Unit Production Manager: Saul Wurtzel
Assistant Director: Ridgeway Callow
Second Assistant Director: Richard Lang
Casting: Owen McLean, Lee Wallace
Script Supervisor: Betty Levin
Art Director: Boris Leven
The Sound of Music Page 17
