The habitual hostess of the Toronto version.
A costume competition during intermission at the London version (Prince Charles Theatre).
The Sing-a-Long Sound of Music phenomenon. Two long, long runners-up (yes that’s a brown paper package tied up with string).
SIXTEEN GOING ON SEVENTEEN
You wait, little girl, on an empty stage
For fate to turn the light on.
Your life, little girl, is an empty page
That men will want to write on—
To write on.
You are sixteen, going on seventeen,
Baby, it’s time to think.
Better beware,
Be canny and careful,
Baby, you’re on the brink.
You are sixteen, going on seventeen,
Fellows will fall in line,
Eager young lads
And roués and cads
Will offer you food and wine.
Totally unprepared are you
To face a world of men.
Timid and shy and scared are you
Of things beyond your ken.
You need someone older and wiser
Telling you what to do . . .
I am seventeen, going on eighteen,
I’ll take care of you.
I am sixteen, going on seventeen,
I know that I’m naïve.
Fellows I meet
May tell me I’m sweet
And willingly I believe.
I am sixteen, going on seventeen,
Innocent as a rose.
Bachelor dandies,
Drinkers of brandies—
What do I know of those?
Totally unprepared am I
To face the world of men.
Timid and shy and scared am I
Of things beyond my ken.
I need someone older and wiser
Telling me what to do . . .
You are seventeen, going on eighteen,
I’ll depend on you.
Charmian Carr going through her dance with someone who looks suspiciously like Daniel Truitthe’s dance double. The gazebo walls are opened up for the shoot.
Brian Davies and Lauri Peters were Broadway’s original “supporting couple.” Peters and the other six children would be jointly nominated for a Tony Award.
When Rodgers and Hammerstein revolutionized the American musical in 1943 with Oklahoma!, they provided a satisfying structure for their shows. Most of them consisted of a main romantic plot and then, to diversify things, a comedic subplot. As they continued their collaboration into the 1950s, they varied the formula—sometimes the main plot would be platonic and confrontational and the subplot would become emotional and romantic, as in The King and I. While the main story of The Sound of Music is taken largely from factual biography, the subplot, that of the eldest von Trapp child, Liesl, falling in love with a young telegraph delivery boy, is the pure invention of Lindsay and Crouse. Although the Liesl/ Rolf subplot allows for the emotional development of a young girl—always a good story, especially when the leading lady is in her early forties—it also sets up the spread of Nazism in the world surrounding the von Trapps.
Rolf’s gradual endorsement of the Nazi Party is an important plot point and allows the audience to grasp Nazism not through a newsreel or abstract concept, but rather through a character’s development instead. (This neat bit of dramaturgy was used seven years later in the musical Cabaret.) Rolf is even allowed the pangs of a youthful conscience—in the final scene, his flashlight catches Liesl hiding among her family, but he decides not to report the von Trapps to his superiors.
Of all the changes from the historical record made in the name of drama, the Liesl/Rolf subplot is the one that so stupefied the von Trapp family that they could only laugh at it. After all, there was no daughter named Liesl, and the eldest von Trapp child was Rupert, a strapping, fifty-four-year-old Vermont physician when the movie was released. For years, when people asked Rupert which of the von Trapp children he was, he would point a finger into the dimple of his chin, curtsy, and say, “I’m Liesl!”
For the movie, “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” was the last musical number filmed in mid-August on the Fox studio lot. The gazebo where Rolf and Liesl share their first kiss (and first dance number) was re-created on the lot, after the original gazebo was left back in Salzburg. (One can still visit it, although it was moved from its original location to the grounds of Hellbrun Palace.) Charmian Carr, who played Liesl, had never sung or danced professionally before the movie. On the first day of filming the dance scene, she was given a new pair of shoes without the traditional rubber-coated soles, and on the first take, Carr jumped on the bench and kept going through the plate-glass windows. “I thought Robert Wise was going to have a heart attack,” she said. “His face just went white because he thought ‘That’s it, she’s done for!’ and he was probably figuring out “How am I going to replace her?’”
Dee Dee Wood’s notes on the choreography for the song.
Luckily Charmian had only sprained her ankle and it was quickly bandaged. The costume crew did what they could to cover the bandage with makeup, but to viewers with sharp eyesight, it was pretty apparent. However, in the recent DVD releases of The Sound of Music, the bandage has been digitally erased. Carr does not remember worrying much about the accident; far more bothersome to her was the age of her co-star, Daniel Truitthe. “I was twenty-one at the time, and he was younger than I—he was twenty. At twenty-one, you wouldn’t dare date a man that was younger. So I had to pretend I liked him.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
AND BACK TO VIENNA
The Salzburg Festival scene performed by the Vienna Volksoper; the brazen reference to the Nazis made audiences sit up and take notice of both the show and their common history.
The von Trapp family never sang in front of the Nazi high command. In fact, one of the reasons they were forced to flee Austria was because a high-ranking Nazi official suggested that it would please the führer if the Trapp Chamber Choir would sing at his forty-ninth birthday party, and Georg von Trapp refused. So, what were they doing on stage at the Salzburg Festival, singing in front of a giant swastika, while soldiers from the Wehrmacht were patroling the audience, guarding the leading Nazi Party official in Salzburg, who was watching the performance from the royal box?
This was not reality, of course. It was a bit of very effective dramatic license courtesy of French-Canadian director Renaud Doucet. Doucet was hired to direct The Sound of Music at the Vienna Volksoper in February 2005. His directorial vision for the penultimate scene where the von Trapps perform at the Festival was a coup de théâtre: with the uniformed Nazi soldiers and blinding searchlights, it felt as if Austria were, once again, under Nazi occupation. A frisson was in the air—some backs stiffened, several people disapproved—but the reception from the audience at the curtain call was rapturous. The Volksoper (“people’s opera”) had pulled off a daring move, ironically, by deciding to produce one of the most commercially successful musicals ever written. Critics (as they always have and apparently always will) sniffed at the choice of material and its execution: “Not a single memorable melody,” said one. (“In contradiction to the views of about 50 million people,” responded Rudolph Berger, the artistic director of the Volksoper and the person responsible for choosing The Sound of Music for the repertory.) The Volksoper production, performed entirely in German, quickly sold out its twenty-two-performance run, then added more than thirty performances and sold those out as well. Under the baton of the Cincinnati Pops’ resident maestro, Erich Kunzel, fifty-three musicians—including an organist—sent the songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein soaring majestically out of the orchestra pit and into the air of Vienna.
It would be thrilling to report that The Sound of Music had returned in triumph to Vienna, the birthplace of Maria Kutschera, but that would be slightly inaccurate.
It had never been performed there at all.
The stunnin
g finale of the Volksoper: the von Trapps face an uncertain future.
The problems with the reception of The Sound of Music in Austria (and, by extension, its neighbor to the north, Germany) started at the very beginning. When Robert Wise was filming in Salzburg in 1964, he encountered immediate resistance from the town fathers about depicting the Anschluss. The suggestion that he might film Nazi soldiers marching through the city, festooned with banners emblazoned with swastikas, was horrifying to the Salzburg authorities, and they refused. Wise countered by suggesting he cut to actual newsreels of the Austrians embracing Hitler. That turned things around quickly, and a compromise was reached whereby a garrison of soldiers marched through the Residenzplatz, framed by one lonely Nazi banner in the background. It was simple but effective. (One can only imagine what William Wyler, had he made the movie, would have done with this sequence.)
What infuriated Wise, however, were not the negotiations for this sequence, but the subsequent actions by Fox’s Munich branch manager once the movie was released in West Germany in 1965, with the title Meine Lieder, Meine Traume (“My Song, My Dream”). The branch manager thought the movie would play better if it ended right after the wedding between the Captain and Maria: pan up to the bells of Mondsee Cathedral tolling joyously, fade out, roll the credits, and just skip all that unpleasantness of the Nazis marching into Salzburg. When Wise heard that the movie had been released this way in Germany, he exploded and, to their credit, so did the executives at Fox. The branch manager was quickly sacked and the original cut of the movie was restored. Beyond the principle of the thing, it hardly mattered; the movie bombed in Germany, and played only a miserable three weeks in Salzburg.
The fact is, neither Germany nor Austria has ever taken to The Sound of Music in any form. Beyond its initial three-week run in 1965, the movie has barely existed in Austria; it was not until Christmas 2000 that Austrian State Broadcasting had even shown the movie on television, and the stage version had never appeared, with the exception of a brief parody version, until the Volksoper version was produced in 2005.
There have been several reasons bruited about for this conspicuous absence. One is that The Sound of Music is simply bringing salt to Salzburg; in other words, it is an Americanized (and thereby assumed to be a coarsened) portrayal of Austrian culture. “It’s a view of Austria unknown to people in this country,” said Rudolph Berger. “Nobody knew The Sound of Music but everybody knew about it.” Indeed, some of the musical’s broad outlines of history and culture could be seen as, if not offensive, certainly not well researched. (The Volksoper made one crucial rectifying change by substituting “Schnitzel with noodles” to ‘Gulasch mit Nockerln,’ which is far more accurate.) It is not surprising that there is a prejudice against the piece because of its popularity and its point of view. Renaud Doucet, the Volksoper director, said, “The Sound of Music is often seen as kitsch, but it reminds us that freedom is something we have to fight for every day; there’s no kitsch in that.” Native cultures will often resist foreign interpretations of their legends and history; the Danny Kaye movie Hans Christian Andersen was totally disregarded in Andersen’s native Denmark, and London violently dismissed the first production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd as a Broadway-ization of a story that every British school-child knew by heart.
Austrians have also claimed that they already had a perfectly good movie version of the von Trapp story—two perfectly good movie versions, in fact: Die Trapp Familie and Die Trapp Familie in Amerika. The two movies were even re-released theatrically in Austria to great success as late as 1985. But the fictional von Trapps were better known in Austria than their actual counterparts; among the few Austrians who knew the full von Trapp story, there were some, according to Rudolph Berger, who harbored a certain resentment toward the von Trapps for leaving the country, while others had to stay through the turmoil of the Nazi occupation.
Which brings one to the third reason: the role of Nazism in the von Trapp story. According to a director of the Salzburg Festival, Helga Rabl-Stadler, “When we deal with our past, there are always two groups in Austria. One group ignores it, doesn’t want to know, and the other group wants to talk about it in a serious way.” One could not argue for long that The Sound of Music deals with the Third Reich in a serious way, but it does present a story that opens up the issue for discussion. Continuing, Rabl-Stadler says, “It is one way to tell young people, ‘The time was like this.’” A very good place to start.
The city fathers of Salzburg conceded the brief use of the Residenzplatz for the filming of the Anschluss for the movie—no cheering crowds were allowed, however.
Johanna von Trapp painted this blossoming of Austria’s most revered flower.
Despite the general apathy on the part of the average good citizen of Austria toward The Sound of Music, it certainly has not hurt the tourist business, especially in Salzburg. Out of one million annual tourists, more than 300,000 people journey there specifically because of The Sound of Music. Three-quarters of all the American tourists who travel there do so because of the sights and sounds of the movie (as do tourists from all over the world, particularly England and, more recently, Japan). Frommer’s Budget Travel magazine named Salzburg as the number one movie-related travel site in the world.
There is certainly enough for a Maria-minded tourist to do in Salzburg. As early as 1966, when American Express set up the first Sound of Music tour, there have been tour buses, guides, and all-day excursions to more than a dozen different locations featured in the movie. Since 1972, Panorama Tours has been the leading tour organization in Salzburg, taking nearly 50,000 customers a year on its various Sound of Music tours. Stefan Herzl, head of Panorama, said, “On our tour we try to bring visitors closer to the city and its surroundings, so you can separate fact from fiction. The more you immerse yourself in the world of Salzburg, the more you love this story.” The very first Sing-a-Long Sound of Music to appear in Salzburg had a successful engagement—which would be repeated—in summer 2005. There is even serious discussion of building a von Trapp Museum in the center of the city.
In the end, The Sound of Music appears capable of melting any heart—or, at the very least, making its presence known as an unstoppable international phenomenon. As Maria says before she begins her journey to the von Trapp villa, “When the Lord closes a door, somewhere He opens a window.” In the continuing saga of The Sound of Music, there appear to be far more windows than doors, and inspired artists around the world are flinging them wide open all the time.
Christopher Plummer sings of the same flower, the edelweiss.
‘WHEN THE LORD CLOSES A DOOR,
SOMEWHERE HE OPENS A WINDOW.’
MARIA VON TRAPP
EDELWEISS
Edelweiss,
Edelweiss,
Every morning you greet me.
Small and white,
Clean and bright,
You look happy to meet me.
Blossom of snow,
May you bloom and grow,
Bloom and grow forever—
Edelweiss,
Edelweiss,
Bless my homeland forever.
Christopher Plummer takes center stage at Rock Riding School to lead his countrymen in a patriotic anthem.
Three drafts of “Edelweiss”: Hammerstein’s notes on the actual flower; a nearly perfect penultimate draft; and the final version, more abstract and less specific, it was still a lovely piece of poetry and Hammerstein’s last full lyric for the stage.
When The Sound of Music had its out-of-town tryout in the fall of 1959, it was a nearly perfect show in the hands of master craftsmen. Normally, a show might undergo a radical revision in a town like Boston, but, musically, at least, there was only significant change to the song list.
It was felt that Theodore Bikel, a natural and accomplished folksinger, could use a moment with his guitar; it would be particularly effective if his character sang something late in the show about the land that he loved. Ironically, d
uring the Boston tryout of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first show, Oklahoma!, in 1943, the producer asked Oscar Hammerstein for a new song in the second act, something that would articulate the characters’ love for their land. In that case, he obliged with the title number. For The Sound of Music, he spent the second week in Boston crafting “Edelweiss” as a song for Captain von Trapp to sing at the Festival competition. The song’s patriotic resonance created a bittersweet atmosphere for the von Trapp family’s departure, and audiences were moved as well.
Because of Hammerstein’s illness and late arrival to Boston, Rodgers—departing from the customary sequence of their collaboration—wrote the music first. As one can see from his handwritten notes, Hammerstein first did some basic research about the flower, the native-grown emblem of Austria. Within the course of a week, he gradually moved to something more poetic and sincerely touching in its direct simplicity. With the exception of some last-minute tweaks in the nuns’ opening song, those lyrics were the last words Oscar Hammerstein would ever craft for the musical stage.
For the movie version, Lehman followed the lead from a line in the original libretto and moved the song earlier in the story, allowing the Captain to show a softer (and more musical) side to his children. Christopher Plummer was not terribly pleased at the assignment: “I hate the guitar! I practiced until my fingers bled. I was trained on the piano—that’s my instrument.” He also had cause to be frustrated by his own vocal instrument. When he was offered the part of the Captain, Plummer was told that his singing would be dubbed—and he immediately turned down the role. After prolonged negotiations, a compromise was reached among Wise, Saul Chaplin and Plummer; he would be assigned a singing coach, record his own vocals, and when the movie went into post-production, they could determine whether or not his singing was up to the demands of the movie.
The Sound of Music Companion: The official companion to the world's most beloved musical Page 12
