As The Sound of Music nears its conclusion, the von Trapp children are on stage performing So Long, Farewell, one child after another taking the lead and then exiting offstage, presumably just one more such finale out of many they had performed in prior concerts in their beloved Austria. This particular finale would be different though, because even though the family wanted the audience to believe it was just another concert, the performance was actually a camouflage for what would be their exit from Austria as it was in the process of being annexed by Hitler in his attempt to conquer the world.
The von Trapp family need not have been in such a delicate position. The patriarch of the family, Georg, had been a national hero in the Austrian navy during World War I, a submarine commander having risen to the rank of captain before he retired. Once Hitler invaded Austria, Captain von Trapp would have been a big feather in the Third Reichs cap, due to his military fame, but also because the family had established itself as a musical force.
Historian William Anderson, in The World of the Trapp Family (1998), declares that during the 1937 Salzburg Festival, the von Trapps were a distinguished feature, performing at the Mozarteum. Following their appearances, concert agents from all over Europe, and even far-off America, presented them with contracts for tours. What a sensation in the music world!
Hitler was acutely aware of the von Trapps rising star and issued what the captains daughter Agathe, in her 2004 autobiography Memories Before and After The Sound of Music, referred to as a series of invitations.
The captain was ordered to take command of a German submarine. His son Rupert, who had just finished medical school, was invited to be chief physician at a Viennese hospital. The whole family was invited to sing on Munich radio to help celebrate Hitlers birthday.
To all those invitations, the von Trapps issued an adamant refusal. Agathe was surely accurate in her autobiographical assessment of the situation: The Nazi regime duly noted all these refusals. Had we remained in Austria, we all would have disappeared into a concentration camp.
So, the stage was set for the von Trapps escape. Only, it was not exactly as the film portrayed it. For the purpose of added drama, the movie version has the family secreting themselves across the Alps over into Switzerland, loaded down with their luggage and musical instruments.
In a 2003 Opera News interview, von Trapp daughter Maria explained, however, that the family left by train, pretending nothing, first going to Italy and then, as that country was being annexed too, making their way to America where they had already been performing periodically as part of their plan to regain economic stability in the aftermath of the Great Depression.
It did not take long for the family to realize that the right place for them to make a home was in Vermont.
Before beginning their fall 1941 concert season, Georg rented a small tourist home known locally as the Stowe Away. The location was perfect for many reasons, including the climate, the mountain views, and hiking trails, all things that reminded the family of their native land.
In 1942, the captain purchased a larger place that would eventually be expanded into a 27-room ski lodge. It was around this time that the State of Vermont leased a camping area, with its old buildings, to the von Trapps so that they could establish what would become the Trapp Family Music Camp. On July 10, 1944, the governor himself, William Wills, presided over the grand opening.
Writing further on in The World of the Trapp Family, Anderson describes how music was everywhere during the camp sessions. Maria and several of her sisters gave recorder lessons, and dedicated beginners disappeared into the woods to practice. Pick-up chamber music groups played in Stephen Foster Hall. From the chapel came the resonant strains of Holy God, We Praise Thy Name, sung by campers of diverse races and creeds.
Within just one year, the camp had become nationally renowned as a center for summer music education.
In 1947, the captain passed away, leaving his second wife, Maria, to carry on the Trapp legacy, which she did, in large part, by penning her own account of the family history, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (1949), which would become the basis for two German movies, a long-running Broadway production, and the famous 1965 American film which, in November 1966, became the highest-grossing movie in American history.
The von Trapps received little profit from that movie because Maria had unknowingly signed away most of her rights when the German films were made.
Moreover, there were other liberties taken by the makers of the 1965 movie. For example, having Maria join the family as governess to all the von Trapp children when, in actuality, she came to the family in 1926 as a tutor for only one of the children coincidently also named Maria who was recovering from scarlet fever and unable to attend regular school.
The tutor would marry Georg in 1927, a full 11 years before the family left Austria.
Five years before that, in 1922, the biological mother of the seven von Trapp children Agathe Whitehead von Trapp had passed away, herself succumbing to scarlet fever.
In Memories Before and After The Sound of Music, the daughter Agathe describes her biological mother, Agathe, and her father in terms of a peace and unity that existed between them, and I thought, This is how it is when one is married. Only later in life did I find out that this is very rare.
In marrying the captain, after the passing of his first wife, Maria had some very big shoes to fill. In fact, in her 1972 autobiography, entitled simply Maria, she admits that at the time she married him, she really and truly was not in love. I liked him but I did not love him.
She accepted his marriage proposal for the simple fact that she had fallen in love with his children. Love for the captain would come later, and she eventually had three children of her own with him, rounding out the number of the von Trapp children to an even 10.
As time moved on, the children would engage in a wide variety of careers: Agathe, for example, opened a kindergarten school, first in Stowe and then Maryland; Maria was a missionary in New Guinea for 30 years; Rupert practiced medicine; Werner became a farmer. The others would lead intriguing lives as well.
However, wherever their travels took them, it was the Trapp Family Lodge and its surrounding landscape that would serve as their common home, with many von Trapp family members, including Georg and Maria, interred at the lodges burial ground.
In 1980, the 27-room lodge was consumed by a devastating fire that resulted in the death of one guest.
True to their persistent nature, the von Trapps saw to the completion, in 1983, of an even more extraordinary lodge, this one having 96 rooms and many new indoor and outdoor amenities. The skiing and biking trails are more extensive than ever before. An indoor gym and onsite restaurant also grace the new establishment. And in the tradition of German and Austrian lagers, the family brews its own quite tasty beer.
The Sound of Music has taken on mythic proportion, having just last year celebrated its highly touted 50th anniversary.
But there is one major disappointment long held by the family, expressed by daughter Agathe in her memoir. The play, lamented Agathe, and later the movie misrepresented our life at home with our father. He was not some naval officer with a distant look and a boatswains whistle in his mouth ready to order us children coldly about. That was the Christopher Plummer version of Georg von Trapp.
Actually, the captain was a warm, engaging parent, who taught his children many of the musical instruments and songs that would make up their public shows. This was before his second wife Maria had even joined the family.
It seems that the matriarch Maria (played by the jubilant, ever-ready-to-please Julie Andrews) was the parent who was most severe, described by daughter Maria, in the 2003 Opera News interview, as having a terrible temper. ... And from one moment to the next, you didnt know what hit her. ... But we took it like a thunderstorm that would pass, because the next minute she could be very nice.
Certainly, after Georg passed away, she was the one who had to figure out ways to hold her large family together through the highs and lows of life. That she was prone at times to be rough in manner is nothing short of a testament to her parenting skill. What we are left with now, though, is the classic movie which, though not altogether accurate, still stands as a fitting tribute to someone who, when she passed away in 1987, was acknowledged as having been one of a kind, and whose passing marked the end of an era for Stowe and the entire world.
James Robert Saunders is a professor of English at Purdue University. He is the author of Howard Frank Mosher and the Classics: Echoes in the Vermont Writers Works.
