Dr. Luis Dias
Last year marked the 60th anniversary of ‘The Sound of Music’, the musical drama film based on the eponymous 1959 stage musical composed by Richard Rodgers with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstain II), which in turn was based on the 1949 memoir ‘The Story of the Trapp Family Singers’ by Maria von Trapp.
I recently read Maria von Trapps’s book and her stepdaughter Agathe von Trapp’s book ‘Before and After The Sound of Music’ and it is quite astonishing to note how much the musical and film deviate from the actual truth, in the guise of ‘artistic license.’
According to the stage musical and film, Maria, a postulant (trainee nun) at a Benedictine abbey near Salzburg, was sent to be governess to the seven children of widowed naval commander, Captain Georg von Trapp, a stern disciplinarian still grieving his wife’s demise but intending to marry a Baroness so the children could have a mother figure in their life. Long story short, Maria swoops in, teaches the children music from scratch (The ‘Do-Re-Mi song, ‘Let’s start from the very beginning…’) and is a ray of sunshine (‘a dop of golden Sun’ in the song) in their joyless lives. Captain and Maria fall in love (despite the scheming Baroness), they marry, go on their honeymoon. Upon their return, the Captain is asked to take command of a submarine for the Nazis the next day, but the family make their exit soon after the Trapp Family have sung their last song (‘So long, farewell’) at the Salzburg Folk Festival. Hotly pursued by the Gestapo, the von Trapps have a hair-raising escape from Salzburg and over the Alps (while ‘Climb every mountain’ plays in the background) to freedom.
One understands the need to ‘spice up’ a story when adapting it for a musical to fit in show-stopping songs and keep an audience hooked throughout. But the trouble with any ‘fictional narrative’ of a true story is: unless the audience knows the real story, how is one to sift fact from fiction, especially in an age where most would rather ‘watch the movie’ than bother reading about it?
The truth: Maria (born Kutschera) was a postulant at Nonnberg Abbey, Salzburg. She had a difficult childhood, and ‘How do you solve a problem like Maria?’ sums up her free spirit well. But she was assigned as governess to just one von Trapp child, Maria Franziska (invalid due to sequelae of scarlet fever), not all seven. To avoid confusion over two Marias in the story, all the children’s names were changed in musical and film.
The von Trapps were already a musical family, something they acquired from their father and first mother. Their father was far from stony and aloof, although he did summon each child by a specific signal on his boatswain whistle as they lived in a large house.
Incidentally, the seven children’s birth mother Agathe (née Whitehead) was the granddaughter of the inventor of the torpedo, Robert Whitehead. Their parents met in Fiume (now in Croatia), where her grandfather owned the first torpedo-manufacturing plant. Agathe christened the submarine Georg would serve in as commander. It was love at first sight for both.
Their eldest daughter (also Agathe) describes the “daring move” her father took at the beginning of World War I, torpedoing and sinking the French battleship ‘Leon Gambetta’ “by night with the rising full moon as a background”, “a one-time opportunity” even though he had “maneuvered outside his assigned territory.” The “heroic maneuver” earned him the Maria Theresian Cross, “the highest award possible in the Austrian Navy.” “Schoolgirls sent him congratulatory letters, and postcards were printed with his photograph and that of the U-5.” Only several pages later does Agathe write that for her father, “his naval victory was bittersweet. He thought of the men and officers who went down with their ship.”
It was difficult to read this without thinking of the pointlessness of war, and closer to home, the cowardly sinking also by torpedo early this month in international waters near Sri Lanka of Iranian frigate ‘Dena’ by an US submarine. It was callously trumpeted as the ‘first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since World War Two’ as if it was something to be proud of. What makes it cowardly is the fact that ‘Dena’ was unarmed according to the protocol of a naval exercise hosted by India in Visakhapatnam, which she had just visited, and thousands of miles away from any combat area. At least 87 Iranian sailors were killed in the attack. A prolonged embarrassing silence from the Indian government was broken by Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar who only commented that the sinking was part of the ‘reality of the Indian Ocean.’ Our weak response has shattered our global standing.
Anyway, to return to the von Trapps.
According to the “other” Maria (Franziska), Maria was no Mary Poppins apparently given to unpredictable bursts of quicksilver temper that would blow over as quickly as they began.
There was no fairytale romance; rather Maria and Georg married for convenience. She wrote that on her wedding day, she was angry, both at God and at Georg, because she really wanted to be a nun. “In a way, I really married the children.”
They were married in 1927, not 1938 just before the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany). Georg was offered a naval commandership, a post her seriously considered accepting (because he missed being out of active service for so long) but then thought better of it. The other triggers for the family decision to flee was Rupert (Kurt in the film), by now a trained doctor, being offered a post in medical service to replace Jewish doctors being ‘disappeared’ into concentration and death camps; and the ‘request’ that the family should sing for Hitler.
When they did flee, they merely walked to the closest railway station and caught the train to Italy, and eventually further on to London and then the US. By then, there were two more von Trapp children, and Maria was pregnant with a third.
Who also fled with the von Trapps (and is airbrushed out of the film, replaced by a fictitious, unscrupulous agent Max Detweiler) is a truly remarkable man: Franz Wasner (1905-1992) Roman Catholic priest, director and conductor of the Trapp Family Singers. Both autobiographies speak most highly of their debt to him. From the time they made his acquaintance in 1935, he encouraged their musical progress and taught them sacred music (motets and Masses by Palestrina, Lasso, Vittoria) to add to their repertoire of folk songs, madrigals, and ballads.He went to archives and libraries to copy unpublished works. He also composed several Masses and more than sixty songs. Through Wasner’s initiative, the family learned and began to play several instruments (soprano, alto, tenor and bass recorder, viola da gamba and spinet) at their performances.
Also missing in the film is the deep reverence for the music of Bach, and the spiritual nourishment the family got from singing his music at pivotal moments in their lives.
But a film musical prefers a more exciting story neatly tied in a bow, rather than the more thought-provoking truth.
