Begin ReadingTable of ContentsAbout the AuthorPhotosCopyright PageThank you for buying thisSt. Martin’s Press ebook.To receive special offers, bonus content,and info on new releases and other great reads,sign up for our newsletters.Or visit us online atus.macmillan.com/newslettersignupFor email updates on the author, click here. The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for yourpersonal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in anyway. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copyof this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright,please notify the publisher at:us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. For Don and Anne AlbinoandS.B. 1.A VERY GOOD PLACE TO START“I guess we did do something rather good.”—JULIE ANDREWS TO CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER IN JULIE ANDREWS ANDCHRISTOPHER PLUMMER—A REMINISCENCEJune 4, 1964: Julie Andrews was freezing. If this was spring weather in theAlps, what was it like in February?With the sun rarely bothering to appear, weather continued to runroughshod over location shooting on The Sound of Music, and theunceasing rain had left one very small, unpaved road as the only wayanyone could reach Mehlweg in southern Bavaria for the filming of themovie’s title song. Which was precisely why the cold but ever-cooperativeAndrews found herself arriving at the scenic meadow location by means ofa decidedly unglamorous jeep.Problems with the jeep, however, paled in comparison to the logisticsinvolved with the rental of the helicopter that would swoop down to filmAndrews as she launched into the world famous title song. Helicopterrentals were expensive—very expensive—and with the 20th Century-Foxfront office firing off memos to director/producer Robert Wise to rein in theoverbudget, much delayed filming, even the perpetually calm director felt the strain of completing the elaborate sequence. With only the first half ofthe number requiring the use of the helicopter, as soon as the shot wascaptured, the pilot would instantly fly to Obersalzburg for the filming of themovie’s finale: the von Trapp family’s escape over the Alps intoSwitzerland. There was no money for even one more day’s helicopterrental.The ever professional Andrews, a seasoned showbiz veteran at a meretwenty-eight, took an extra moment to prepare herself for the carefullystaged rendering of the title song. This was no ordinary musical number, nosong-and-dance routine laid down in the carefully controlled confines of thestudio. Instead, in order to convey the sense of open-air freedom envisionedby Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman, a helicopter with storyboard artistMaurice Zuberano onboard would swoop in to film Andrews as she beganher lilting vocal. With the helicopter weighed down by bulky equipmentand cameraman Paul Beeson strapped precariously onto the side of thecraft, the shot would prove difficult in execution—and potentially thrilling.Wise and cinematographer Ted McCord knew that this opening not onlyhad to look right, but would also establish the musical vocabulary for theentire film. If viewers did not accept the convention of Maria singing toherself while alone in the mountains, what would they ever make of a ten-minute montage set to the childlike “Do-Re-Mi”?Wise had spent hours considering countless possible camera movementsfor this opening, only to discard every last one of them in favor of anoverhead shot. Still, he hesitated. It would read onscreen just like the startof his own Academy Award–winning West Side Story, which began with aswooping camera that picked up dancers silhouetted against the New YorkCity landscape. Well, the director figured, maybe it wasn’t original, but atleast he was stealing from himself.McCord would be photographing the Alps—God’s country—and thescene cried out for an omniscient, all seeing, from-the-sky approach, whichis why the sixty-year-old Wise found himself perched halfway up a tree, waiting for the precise combination of light and wind speed that wouldallow Andrews to burst forth spinning into the title song.But first, the shot had to be lined up and framed. There couldn’t be thehint of another human being in sight: postulant Maria Rainer, momentarilyfreed from the stifling abbey, was singing precisely because she wasbasking in glorious solitude with nature. Andrews’s slight figure would landsmack in the middle of the frame, a speck against the wide open spacesuntil the helicopter zoomed in closer, still closer, and then—From his perch halfway up the tree, Wise called out:“Ready?… Roll camera.”Camera operator, soundman, and loader replied:“Roll Camera.”“Speed.”“Scene one, Take one.”After the slate was clapped directly in front of the lens, Robert Wisepaused momentarily and then commanded:“Action!”All eyes swiveled toward Julie Andrews. And waited. Until everyonerealized that Julie could not hear any of that traditional start-of-scenechecklist over the noise of the approaching helicopter.Time to regroup. Choreographer Marc Breaux would now bellow “Go!”into his bullhorn, Andrews would charge forward, walking quickly in timeto the music until at exactly the right moment she’d lean into her openinghillside twirl.“Ready?”Camera running up to speed, scene slated, and once again: “Action!”Andrews strode purposefully across the meadow, throwing herself into afull-bodied twirl, arms outstretched as if to embrace the entire world, andlaunched into the film’s opening words: “The hills are alive…”Gone was the song’s introductory verse beginning with the pensive “Myday in the hills has come to an end, I know.” Instead, bam! Right into thechorus—and right into Rodgers and Hammerstein’s uncanny mix of music and faith. The song continued, and thirty seconds later there was Juliewanting to “sing through the night—like a lark who is learning to pray.”Uh-oh, a praying bird? Was this all going to be too saccharine? Maybe—butthanks to St. Augustine, wasn’t one of the von Trapp family sayings “Whenyou sing, you pray twice?”But for now there was trouble. Big trouble. And not with Andrews’sperformance. No matter the take, she lipsynched with pinpoint accuracy toher prerecorded vocal. The problem lay with the helicopter. With thenominal camera operator refusing to hang out of the plane, Britishcinematographer Paul Beeson assisted Wise and McCord by operating thecamera himself while strapped to the side of the craft, the only way tocapture the sought-after shot of Julie Andrews skimming along the meadowwithout the shadow of the craft falling on the ground. But each time thecraft circled back to its starting position for another take, the force of thecraft’s downdraft proved so strong that Andrews found herself knockedover, sprawled in the grass while trying to avoid the mud. Pulling grass outof her hair and off her costume, makeup adjusted yet again, she wouldstride, twirl, sing, and once more find herself on the ground. Having beenknocked down on fully half of the ten takes, even the placid Andrews“finally got so angry I yelled ‘That’s enough!’” Yell she did, but even EthelMerman herself couldn’t have been heard over the sound of the helicopter,and the pilot interpreted his star’s hand signals asking him to please make awider turn as a thumbs-up gesture of “You’re doing great—let’s go for onemore.” Was this any way to begin a multimillion-dollar musical? As itturned out, yes. And then some.Wise, McCord, and Lehman had, in tandem with musicalmaestro/associate producer Saul Chaplin and co-choreographers MarcBreaux and Dee Dee Wood, worked to finesse every last phrase of thissong, yet here they were, in the third month of shooting, and one questionstill lay over the entire enterprise: could any of this really work? Wouldpeople buy a nun bursting into song—and in the opening shots of an eight-million-dollar widescreen Todd-AO, stereophonic sound production no less? People expected reality from their movies now. Foreign films and themarked relaxation of production code taboos had changed the very nature ofmoviegoing. Religious pictures were no longer in vogue and musicals hadfallen out of favor; how was any of this going to be received?As it turned out, with a worldwide fervent devotion, five AcademyAwards, vitriolic critical disdain, and a cultural impact that continues toresonate some five decades after the film’s initial release. But for now, JulieAndrews just needed to pick herself up, dust herself off, and try herdamnedest to channel the life force that was Maria Augusta Kutschera vonTrapp, a woman whose complex real-life backstory made the Maria vonTrapp found in The Sound of Music appear to be, well, Mary Poppins.A nun turned governess, Maria von Trapp had married her naval heroemployer, instantly inherited his seven children, given birth to three more,pushed the entire family to international singing stardom, outwitted theNazis, emigrated to America, and morphed into a combination of Austrianrelief dynamo, lodge owner, missionary, entrepreneur, loving familymatriarch, and occasionally, family dictator. It all played out like a real-lifefairy tale, and by the time Maria von Trapp died in 1987 at the age ofeighty-two, thanks to the Sound of Music she had been turned into nothingless than a secular saint. Sainted not by her own claims, though she hardlyshunned the attention, but by the millions around the globe who wanted tobelieve that someone—anyone—could be as good as the Maria von Trappglimpsed forty feet high on the screen in the utterly winning persona ofJulie Andrews. Maria von Trapp, they reasoned, was proof positive thatsomething good did indeed still exist in the ever-changing, ever-frighteningworld of the twentieth century. Was she really so good, so, well, perfect?In the words of the John Ford Western masterpiece The Man Who ShotLiberty Valance: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” 2.HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE …“I realized when I was a little girl, that to get her attention you really had to engage her.She had done these tremendous things in her life; met presidents and kings, and I could tellthat she didn’t have time for a lot of details.”—MARIA VON TRAPP’S GRANDDAUGHTER ELISABETH, VANITY FAIR, JUNE 1998The one overwhelming irony lying at the heart of The Sound of Music’simmutable status as a touchstone of childhood innocence is that Mariaherself had anything but a storybook childhood. Far from security andhappiness, Maria’s formative years featured insecurity, neglect, and ofttimesdownright cruelty.Born on a train bound for Vienna on January 26, 1905, Maria was onlythree years old when her mother died. After first living with a father whowas unable or unwilling to take care of her, the youngster was sent to livewith foster parents. When, after her father died in 1914, nine-year-old Mariawas forced to live with a relative known as “Uncle” Franz, the darkest yearsof her life ensued. Far from providing a welcoming home, the tyrannicalFranz, a socialist and anti-Catholic atheist, had little time for his youngcharge, and, as detailed in Maria’s decades’ later autobiography, often beather. Small wonder, then, that Maria’s youngest child Johannes (the tenth and final von Trapp child, born in 1939) has publicly stated that his“complex” mother’s exceedingly unhappy childhood had left her with“insecurities that plagued her all of her life.”Figuring that education could provide a way out of her unhappycircumstances, Maria worked to put herself through Vienna’s StateTeacher’s College for Progressive Education. It was during those years thatshe began to spend increasing amounts of time wandering in the beautiful,mountainous Austrian countryside. These solitary journeys provided Mariawith the sense of freedom and peace missing from her childhood, while alsoproviding an ideal outlet for her boundless energy.And energy she had. To burn. It’s easy for audiences accustomed to theMaria von Trapp found in the figures of the trim Julie Andrews, or thepetite Mary Martin who originated the role of Maria in the Broadwayproduction of The Sound of Music, to forget the fact that Maria was asubstantial woman whose sturdy frame proved ideal for her mountainsideforays. Forthright, indeed blunt, and the possessor of a booming laugh,Maria remained a formidable figure well into her dotage, a no-nonsense,frequently tough woman full of boundless energy who registered as arounder, Austrian version of Katharine Hepburn and her all-American no-nonsense practicality.As to how Maria’s life morphed from an unhappy childhood to that of awould-be nun, the answer, in Maria’s view, lay in divine revelation. Whilestill a teenager, she had joined a hiking group, and it was her suggestion thatthe club hike high into the Alps, to regions where snow remained even insummer. Surrounded by the literally breathtaking scenery, “suddenly itoccurred to me—all this—God gives to me. What can I give him? I decidedto go into a convent, which has perpetual enclosure.”It was this revelation, combined with a Palm Sunday service sheattended while studying at college, that led her to the abbey upongraduation. Expecting nothing more from the Palm Sunday service than achance to hear the music of Bach that she loved, Maria found somethingquite different: “Now I had heard from my uncle that all of these Bible stories were inventions and old legends, and that there wasn’t a word oftruth in them. But the way this man talked just swept me off my feet. I wascompletely overwhelmed.”Convinced that she would find the love and security so lacking in hereveryday life within abbey walls, Maria traveled to Salzburg. Locatedbetween Munich and Vienna, and famed as the home of Mozart, Salzburghad existed as an independent church state for more than one thousandyears before joining Austria in 1816. Perhaps with this history in mind,upon her arrival Maria, in an extraordinary display of naïveté, simply askedthe first policeman she encountered for the name of the strictest abbey in allof Salzburg. “Nonnberg Abbey,” the answer came back.Founded in A.D. 719, Nonnberg (“Nun Mountain”), which is situated onan overlook outside of the city proper, was more than the strictest abbey inthe area—it was also the oldest. After walking to the abbey, Mariaannounced that she wished to join the novitiate, and after meeting with theMother Abbess, found herself beginning the life of a novice at age nineteen.Says youngest child Johannes: “She did everything 100 percent. Havingfound a religious belief in her late teens—after an hours’ long confession—she wanted to dedicate her life to God.”In her autobiography, and of course in both the stage and film versionsof The Sound of Music, that nineteen-year-old novice stands front andcenter throughout the life of the entire abbey. Such starlike stature may wellhave been embellished in recall by Maria herself. In an amusing anecdoterecounted by Sound of Music screenwriter Ernest Lehman, when Lehmanand the film’s then-director William Wyler went to speak with the MotherAbbess in 1963 (with the aim of gathering background information aboutMaria), the Mother Abbess, in Lehman’s recall, reacted as if to say, “Who’sMaria?” “The Reverend Mother hardly remembered who Maria was … Ithink Maria exaggerated her importance at the Abbey enormously in thestory.”In fact, the mention of Maria von Trapp could still cause decidedlymixed emotions on the part of Salzburg natives, with some going so far as to deny she had ever entered the novitiate at Nonnberg. Peter Husty, thehead of exhibitions at the Salzburg Museum, went on record as suggestingthat Maria’s time at the abbey may have been grossly exaggerated, orperhaps even nonexistent, calling her relationship to Nonnberg Abbey “alittle strange.” Pointing out that she had been neither a teacher nor a nun, heemphasized the fact that unlike other novitiates, Maria left no trace at theabbey: no record of her birth, her mother, or her father; in his words sheresembled “a will of the wisp.” (Husty’s viewpoint would seem undercutmerely by the fact that when the family traveled to Salzburg in 1950, Mariaheld a personal reunion with the Mother Abbess.)What was undoubtedly true, however, was that Maria was far moreenthralled with the beautiful countryside outside of Salzburg than she waswith life in the abbey. Possessed of great natural beauty, ringed bysnowcapped mountains, and nestled in Austria’s lake district, Salzburg, ormore particularly the surrounding environs, provided a setting in whichMaria immediately felt at home. Escaping to the mountains every chanceshe had, Maria first bent and then broke the strict rules of the abbey.As the song “How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?” would haveit, she actually did whistle and sing within the abbey walls, and the detailsof her personality paint her as a remarkably unpromising candidate for thequiet life of a nun in a cloistered abbey. Tales abounded of one nun who hadnot looked out the window at the outside world in fifty years. Fifty years?Maria couldn’t last fifteen minutes without looking out of the window todrink in the surrounding natural beauty. Penance for looking out thewindow took the form of kissing the floor, and Maria would simply savetime by kissing the floor first and then look out the window. This actionfound its way into The Sound of Music via Maria’s confession regardingSister Berthe: rather than follow Sister Berthe’s instruction that she kiss thefloor after committing a transgression, she figured she would break anotherrule sooner rather than later, so saved time by kissing the ground at the mereapproach of Sister Berthe. In the words of Johannes von Trapp: “My mother was absolutely unsuited for a contemplative life in the abbey. I suspect thenuns were happy when the position opened up in our father’s house.”Nonnberg would never be quite the same again thanks to the unrulyMaria, who claimed that the nuns found her too coarse: “I had no manners.I was more boy than girl.” She was not officially asked to leave the abbey,but it was thought that perhaps some time away might prove beneficial.Given her background as a teacher she was deemed just the right candidateto tutor Captain Georg von Trapp’s young daughter Maria. (Maria’ssuitability as a teacher might have been recalibrated if the captain had everbeen able to hear The Sound of Music’s assistant director Georg Steinitz,who held a nodding acquaintance with her; Maria had taught Steinitz’smother before entering the abbey, and in Georg’s chuckling recall, hismother termed Maria “an awfully strict person—a dominating person. Mymother felt her religious beliefs were close to what we would today callfanatical.”)A captain in the Austrian Navy and a decorated hero from his serviceduring the First World War, by this time Georg von Trapp had sufferedmonumental losses in both his private and professional lives. When Austrialost the war it lost its entire coastline, and his job as a naval captain ceasedto exist. Georg then lost his wife, Agathe Whitehead, to scarlet fever inSeptember of 1922, leaving him sole parent to seven children: Rupert,Agathe, Maria, Werner, Hedwig, Johanna, and Martina.Although well off financially (it had, in fact, been wife Agathe whosemoney buoyed the family’s fortune; her grandfather had invented themodern torpedo), Georg was overwhelmed with his duties as a single parentand looking for assistance. While both the screen and stage versions of TheSound of Music depict Maria as governess to all seven children, she washired simply as a tutor to young Maria, whose own bout with scarlet feverhad left her too weak to walk the four miles to school every day. Perhapsbecause young Maria spent more time with her twenty-one-year-old tutorthan any of the other six Von Trapp children, she was able, late in life, tooffer up the sharpest, most clear-eyed assessment of her tutor turned stepmother: “She needed, all the time, excitement, so she createdexcitement. Sometimes it was too much for us, but she was a leader.”Maria’s description of her appearance on the day of her arrival at thevilla in Aigen in late summer of 1926 seems to mirror the film’s depictionof a satchel-swinging, guitar-toting Julie Andrews so accurately that itseems to have directly inspired the film’s costume designer, DorothyJeakins. Wrote Maria: “My satchel looked exactly like the bag of a horse-and-buggy doctor.” Even Maria’s unattractive dress in the film (“The poordidn’t want this one”) seems to have been inspired by Maria’s actualgarment; said daughter Maria: “She had a horrible dress on.”As to the actual first meeting between Maria and the Von Trapp family,it was, in her recollection, both low-key and not markedly different fromhow it is depicted in the film. The captain executed a slight bow towardMaria, took out a whistle, and blew signals to summon his seven children,who ranged in age from four to fourteen.In contrast to the film’s depiction of a whistle-blowing martinet, Captainvon Trapp actually used the bosun’s whistle only to locate his children onthe grounds of his rather large estate. But the seven children really did wearsailor suits and, for moviegoers around the world who carry the image ofseven children summoned by their father’s whistle marching down the stairsto meet their new governess, Maria’s recall of the event matches the film insurprisingly close fashion: “Led by a sober-faced young girl in her earlyteens, an almost solemn little procession descended step by step in well-mannered silence—four girls and two boys, all dressed in blue sailor suits.”So ingrained was this childhood training of responding to signals that untilthe day she died at age ninety-nine, daughter Maria retained the ability toplay every one of the seven signals. In Agathe’s recollection: “We loved oursignals.”In reality, Georg was a warm and loving if somewhat overwhelmedfather. It was actually Maria herself (called “Gustl” by the children), withher emotionally stunted upbringing, who needed thawing. Starved foraffection, a woman/child who had literally grown up without being kissed, she found herself willing putty in the hands of the youngest children. Forthose who find the film’s connection between governess and children tooprecious for words, the reality actually proved even more deeply emotional:“I grew up without being kissed.… And then I came here to this house, andone of the little ones, Johanna—she was seven years old—shespontaneously came up to me one day, put her hands around my neck, andkissed me. I remember the sensation very well. It was the first consciouskiss of my life.” Small wonder, then, that Maria later wrote in herautobiography: “Only one thing is necessary to be happy … and that onething is not money, nor connections, nor health—it is love.”If it is a universal truth that every person alive has, at one time oranother, felt misunderstood, underappreciated or in need of love, then inMaria’s very real recollection of Johanna’s kiss lies a key to the film’sextraordinary success: more than the romance between Maria and thecaptain, the love story at the heart of The Sound of Music is the one betweenMaria and the children. Indeed, Maria herself publicly and repeatedlyacknowledged that she fell in love with the children quickly, but only grewto love Georg after their marriage.In that light, it makes sense that the captain’s marriage proposal provedfar more prosaic in real life than in the film’s depiction of a moonlit song ina romantic, waterside gazebo. As related by her granddaughter, Maria wasstanding on a stepladder polishing a chandelier when the children ran in tothe room crying out, “Poppa says he will marry you.”In the recollection of Agathe von Trapp, her father asked her: “Do youthink I should marry Gustl? You know, she’s quite pretty.” Agatheanswered: “I think if it is the will of God then you should marry her.” Itwas, in fact, Agathe who late in life offered the most judicious explanationof Maria’s marriage to Georg. Did Georg love Maria at the time of themarriage? Agathe responded thoughtfully: “I can’t say I know it or I don’tknow it … but since he did what he did he must have liked her. But the wayI saw it, I think she was providential, to be our second mother.” Said third oldest child Maria: “When she first came it was heaven onEarth. We took to her quickly. She sang, she knew new songs.… But Iwanted Maria to stay a bigger sister.… I didn’t want my father to marry her.I loved my mother so much I didn’t want him to marry again ever.… Butthat was not possible. We never talked about this of course. We just let ithappen.”If in the film Maria is thrilled when the captain finally declares his love,in real life her reaction proved far less sanguine. After the Mother Superiortold Maria that marriage to the captain and mothering his seven childrenrepresented the will of God, Maria found “All my happiness shattered, andmy heart, which had so longed to give itself entirely to God, felt rejected.”First came a marriage proposal received in the middle of doing housework,not from one’s intended, but rather, from his children. Next, the prospectivebride displayed a less-than-thrilled reaction at the very prospect ofmarriage. Not exactly the stuff of Rodgers and Hammerstein songs. But themagic of any tale lies in the way it is told, and in the decades’ later hands ofRodgers, Hammerstein, Wise, and Lehman, the lives of Maria and Georgvon Trapp were turned into popular art that appealed to the entire world.Did the family only begin singing after Maria arrived on the scene? Theactual chronology here becomes a little fuzzy; it is unquestioned that Mariabrought a guitar with her, but while some recollect that the children werealready singing before Maria’s arrival, in Maria’s own words: “They didn’tsing. I couldn’t understand this. It was the first thing we did. We startedsinging.” On the other hand, in daughter Maria’s recollection, the VonTrapp villa was hardly the dour, music-less atmosphere depicted in the film:“Sometimes our house must have sounded like a musical conservatory.…You could hear us practice piano, violin, guitar, cello, clarinet, accordion,and later, recorders.” Agathe von Trapp, in fact, specifies that father Georgwas very musical, teaching Rupert and Maria the accordion, Johanna theviolin, and Agathe herself the guitar. There was, in her recollection, noquestion about it: singing and the playing of instruments began long beforethe arrival of Maria. To the contrary, it was Gustl, she stressed, who joined in with an already singing family. “Thanks to our father, we already had arepertoire by the time Gustl arrived in our home.”Regardless of when the children actually began singing, after Maria’smarriage to the Captain took place on November 27, 1927, at NonnbergAbbey, the vocalizing remained an intrafamily affair until the mid-1930s,when the family’s entire life was upended with the arrival of Father FranzWasner.In theory, Father Wasner had simply come to the von Trapp villa to livein a rented room and say mass in the family chapel. In reality, he ended upchanging the lives of every member of the family. It all started simplyenough when, after listening to the family sing, Father Wasner told themthat they sounded quite good but could sing even better. Conducting fromhis seat, he insisted that the family repeat a motet until it sounded exactlyright. Once the priest stated that what the family sang was very nice—“but”—the die was cast. Said Maria: “That ‘but’ was the decision of ourlives.… None of us knew then just how lucky we were: this was the birth ofthe Trapp Family Singers.” The entire Sound of Music global phenomenonhad begun with one single word: but.In the first movie version of the Von Trapp saga, the 1956 Germanlanguage film Die Trapp-Familie, Father Wasner plays a central role as themusical taskmaster responsible for molding the Trapp Family Singers. Bythe time The Sound of Music hit Broadway three years later, he had beenjettisoned by librettists Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, who decidedthat his presence would undercut Maria’s role as musical tutor. In 1930sAustria, however, Father Wasner actually formed a very close alliance withMaria, with the priest dictating the family’s musical direction while Mariarather willingly fulfilled the role of entrepreneur, cajoling and pushing thefamily to fame.So intertwined did the twosome become that in 1935 they actuallycollaborated on a love song entitled “Zwei Menschen”—“Two People”—with Father Wasner the composer and Maria the lyricist. Exactly how closewas their relationship? Sympatico enough to write a song with translated lyrics that prove decidedly unexpected from a collaboration between apriest and a former novice:Two people walking under the starlit moonThe apple trees are in bloomThe petals are falling on their heads like snowThe bells are ringing in the distanceWhen interviewed for a 2012 documentary, Father Wasner’s nephewcommented on the fact that Maria and his uncle were genuinely kindredspirits; born in the same year and raised in similar hardscrabblecircumstances, each was firmly dedicated to music and the church alike.The two wrote “Zwei Menschen” in the year they met, and in the words ofWasner’s nephew: “They both probably had unfulfilled dreams.… It’s anexpression of something but we don’t know what.” Was it a love song?Were they in love? The answer will never be known.Having openly and repeatedly criticized Hitler, Father Wasner found itnecessary to leave Austria, accompanying the Von Trapps to the UnitedStates in the 1930s, where he continued as the driving musical force behindthe Trapp Family Singers for two more decades. After the family stoppedperforming in 1956, Maria and Franz went their separate ways; Franz spentfive years as a missionary on Fiji, followed by time in the Holy Land and astint as rector of a seminary in Rome. Upon retirement, he returned toSalzburg where he lived until his death in 1992.Maria and Franz were not reunited until 1983, when Maria made a finaltrip to Salzburg while the Vermont family lodge was being rebuilt after adevastating fire; the footage of their reunion reveals a duo so simpatico thatit seems as if they are picking up a conversation they had finished fiveminutes earlier. As they finished each other’s sentences and filled inmissing bits of recollection, it was easy to fully comprehend Maria’sstatement: “He slowly but surely molded us into a real musical entity—an