The_Sound_of_Music_Story_-_Tom_Santopietro
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For Don and Anne Albino
and
S.B.
1.
A VERY GOOD PLACE TO START
“I guess we did do something rather good.”
—JULIE ANDREWS TO CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER IN JULIE ANDREWS AND
CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER—A REMINISCENCE
June 4, 1964: Julie Andrews was freezing. If this was spring weather in the
Alps, what was it like in February?
With the sun rarely bothering to appear, weather continued to run
roughshod over location shooting on The Sound of Music, and the
unceasing rain had left one very small, unpaved road as the only way
anyone could reach Mehlweg in southern Bavaria for the filming of the
movie’s title song. Which was precisely why the cold but ever-cooperative
Andrews found herself arriving at the scenic meadow location by means of
a decidedly unglamorous jeep.
Problems with the jeep, however, paled in comparison to the logistics
involved with the rental of the helicopter that would swoop down to film
Andrews as she launched into the world famous title song. Helicopter
rentals were expensive—very expensive—and with the 20th Century-Fox
front office firing off memos to director/producer Robert Wise to rein in the
overbudget, much delayed filming, even the perpetually calm director felt
the strain of completing the elaborate sequence. With only the first half of
the number requiring the use of the helicopter, as soon as the shot was
captured, the pilot would instantly fly to Obersalzburg for the filming of the
movie’s finale: the von Trapp family’s escape over the Alps into
Switzerland. There was no money for even one more day’s helicopter
rental.
The ever professional Andrews, a seasoned showbiz veteran at a mere
twenty-eight, took an extra moment to prepare herself for the carefully
staged rendering of the title song. This was no ordinary musical number, no
song-and-dance routine laid down in the carefully controlled confines of the
studio. Instead, in order to convey the sense of open-air freedom envisioned
by Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman, a helicopter with storyboard artist
Maurice Zuberano onboard would swoop in to film Andrews as she began
her lilting vocal. With the helicopter weighed down by bulky equipment
and cameraman Paul Beeson strapped precariously onto the side of the
craft, the shot would prove difficult in execution—and potentially thrilling.
Wise and cinematographer Ted McCord knew that this opening not only
had to look right, but would also establish the musical vocabulary for the
entire film. If viewers did not accept the convention of Maria singing to
herself 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 movements
for this opening, only to discard every last one of them in favor of an
overhead shot. Still, he hesitated. It would read onscreen just like the start
of his own Academy Award–winning West Side Story, which began with a
swooping camera that picked up dancers silhouetted against the New York
City landscape. Well, the director figured, maybe it wasn’t original, but at
least he was stealing from himself.
McCord would be photographing the Alps—God’s country—and the
scene cried out for an omniscient, all seeing, from-the-sky approach, which
is why the sixty-year-old Wise found himself perched halfway up a tree,
waiting for the precise combination of light and wind speed that would
allow Andrews to burst forth spinning into the title song.
But first, the shot had to be lined up and framed. There couldn’t be the
hint of another human being in sight: postulant Maria Rainer, momentarily
freed from the stifling abbey, was singing precisely because she was
basking in glorious solitude with nature. Andrews’s slight figure would land
smack in the middle of the frame, a speck against the wide open spaces
until 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 Wise
paused momentarily and then commanded:
“Action!”
All eyes swiveled toward Julie Andrews. And waited. Until everyone
realized that Julie could not hear any of that traditional start-of-scene
checklist 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 time
to the music until at exactly the right moment she’d lean into her opening
hillside twirl.
“Ready?”
Camera running up to speed, scene slated, and once again: “Action!”
Andrews strode purposefully across the meadow, throwing herself into a
full-bodied twirl, arms outstretched as if to embrace the entire world, and
launched into the film’s opening words: “The hills are alive…”
Gone was the song’s introductory verse beginning with the pensive “My
day in the hills has come to an end, I know.” Instead, bam! Right into the
chorus—and right into Rodgers and Hammerstein’s uncanny mix of music
and faith. The song continued, and thirty seconds later there was Julie
wanting 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—but
thanks to St. Augustine, wasn’t one of the von Trapp family sayings “When
you sing, you pray twice?”
But for now there was trouble. Big trouble. And not with Andrews’s
performance. No matter the take, she lipsynched with pinpoint accuracy to
her prerecorded vocal. The problem lay with the helicopter. With the
nominal camera operator refusing to hang out of the plane, British
cinematographer Paul Beeson assisted Wise and McCord by operating the
camera himself while strapped to the side of the craft, the only way to
capture the sought-after shot of Julie Andrews skimming along the meadow
without the shadow of the craft falling on the ground. But each time the
craft circled back to its starting position for another take, the force of the
craft’s downdraft proved so strong that Andrews found herself knocked
over, sprawled in the grass while trying to avoid the mud. Pulling grass out
of her hair and off her costume, makeup adjusted yet again, she would
stride, twirl, sing, and once more find herself on the ground. Having been
knocked 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 Ethel
Merman 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 a
wider turn as a thumbs-up gesture of “You’re doing great—let’s go for one
more.” Was this any way to begin a multimillion-dollar musical? As it
turned out, yes. And then some.
Wise, McCord, and Lehman had, in tandem with musical
maestro/associate producer Saul Chaplin and co-choreographers Marc
Breaux and Dee Dee Wood, worked to finesse every last phrase of this
song, yet here they were, in the third month of shooting, and one question
still lay over the entire enterprise: could any of this really work? Would
people 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 the
marked relaxation of production code taboos had changed the very nature of
moviegoing. Religious pictures were no longer in vogue and musicals had
fallen out of favor; how was any of this going to be received?
As it turned out, with a worldwide fervent devotion, five Academy
Awards, vitriolic critical disdain, and a cultural impact that continues to
resonate some five decades after the film’s initial release. But for now, Julie
Andrews just needed to pick herself up, dust herself off, and try her
damnedest to channel the life force that was Maria Augusta Kutschera von
Trapp, a woman whose complex real-life backstory made the Maria von
Trapp found in The Sound of Music appear to be, well, Mary Poppins.
A nun turned governess, Maria von Trapp had married her naval hero
employer, instantly inherited his seven children, given birth to three more,
pushed the entire family to international singing stardom, outwitted the
Nazis, emigrated to America, and morphed into a combination of Austrian
relief dynamo, lodge owner, missionary, entrepreneur, loving family
matriarch, and occasionally, family dictator. It all played out like a real-life
fairy tale, and by the time Maria von Trapp died in 1987 at the age of
eighty-two, thanks to the Sound of Music she had been turned into nothing
less than a secular saint. Sainted not by her own claims, though she hardly
shunned the attention, but by the millions around the globe who wanted to
believe that someone—anyone—could be as good as the Maria von Trapp
glimpsed forty feet high on the screen in the utterly winning persona of
Julie Andrews. Maria von Trapp, they reasoned, was proof positive that
something good did indeed still exist in the ever-changing, ever-frightening
world of the twentieth century. Was she really so good, so, well, perfect?
In the words of the John Ford Western masterpiece The Man Who Shot
Liberty 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 tell
that she didn’t have time for a lot of details.”
—MARIA VON TRAPP’S GRANDDAUGHTER ELISABETH, VANITY FAIR, JUNE 1998
The one overwhelming irony lying at the heart of The Sound of Music’s
immutable status as a touchstone of childhood innocence is that Maria
herself had anything but a storybook childhood. Far from security and
happiness, Maria’s formative years featured insecurity, neglect, and ofttimes
downright cruelty.
Born on a train bound for Vienna on January 26, 1905, Maria was only
three years old when her mother died. After first living with a father who
was unable or unwilling to take care of her, the youngster was sent to live
with foster parents. When, after her father died in 1914, nine-year-old Maria
was forced to live with a relative known as “Uncle” Franz, the darkest years
of her life ensued. Far from providing a welcoming home, the tyrannical
Franz, a socialist and anti-Catholic atheist, had little time for his young
charge, and, as detailed in Maria’s decades’ later autobiography, often beat
her. 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 unhappy
circumstances, Maria worked to put herself through Vienna’s State
Teacher’s College for Progressive Education. It was during those years that
she began to spend increasing amounts of time wandering in the beautiful,
mountainous Austrian countryside. These solitary journeys provided Maria
with the sense of freedom and peace missing from her childhood, while also
providing an ideal outlet for her boundless energy.
And energy she had. To burn. It’s easy for audiences accustomed to the
Maria von Trapp found in the figures of the trim Julie Andrews, or the
petite Mary Martin who originated the role of Maria in the Broadway
production of The Sound of Music, to forget the fact that Maria was a
substantial woman whose sturdy frame proved ideal for her mountainside
forays. 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 a
rounder, 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 a
would-be nun, the answer, in Maria’s view, lay in divine revelation. While
still a teenager, she had joined a hiking group, and it was her suggestion that
the club hike high into the Alps, to regions where snow remained even in
summer. Surrounded by the literally breathtaking scenery, “suddenly it
occurred to me—all this—God gives to me. What can I give him? I decided
to go into a convent, which has perpetual enclosure.”
It was this revelation, combined with a Palm Sunday service she
attended while studying at college, that led her to the abbey upon
graduation. Expecting nothing more from the Palm Sunday service than a
chance to hear the music of Bach that she loved, Maria found something
quite 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 of
truth in them. But the way this man talked just swept me off my feet. I was
completely overwhelmed.”
Convinced that she would find the love and security so lacking in her
everyday life within abbey walls, Maria traveled to Salzburg. Located
between Munich and Vienna, and famed as the home of Mozart, Salzburg
had existed as an independent church state for more than one thousand
years before joining Austria in 1816. Perhaps with this history in mind,
upon her arrival Maria, in an extraordinary display of naïveté, simply asked
the first policeman she encountered for the name of the strictest abbey in all
of Salzburg. “Nonnberg Abbey,” the answer came back.
Founded in A.D. 719, Nonnberg (“Nun Mountain”), which is situated on
an overlook outside of the city proper, was more than the strictest abbey in
the area—it was also the oldest. After walking to the abbey, Maria
announced that she wished to join the novitiate, and after meeting with the
Mother Abbess, found herself beginning the life of a novice at age nineteen.
Says youngest child Johannes: “She did everything 100 percent. Having
found 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 versions
of The Sound of Music, that nineteen-year-old novice stands front and
center throughout the life of the entire abbey. Such starlike stature may well
have been embellished in recall by Maria herself. In an amusing anecdote
recounted by Sound of Music screenwriter Ernest Lehman, when Lehman
and the film’s then-director William Wyler went to speak with the Mother
Abbess in 1963 (with the aim of gathering background information about
Maria), the Mother Abbess, in Lehman’s recall, reacted as if to say, “Who’s
Maria?” “The Reverend Mother hardly remembered who Maria was … I
think Maria exaggerated her importance at the Abbey enormously in the
story.”
In fact, the mention of Maria von Trapp could still cause decidedly
mixed 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, the
head of exhibitions at the Salzburg Museum, went on record as suggesting
that Maria’s time at the abbey may have been grossly exaggerated, or
perhaps even nonexistent, calling her relationship to Nonnberg Abbey “a
little strange.” Pointing out that she had been neither a teacher nor a nun, he
emphasized the fact that unlike other novitiates, Maria left no trace at the
abbey: no record of her birth, her mother, or her father; in his words she
resembled “a will of the wisp.” (Husty’s viewpoint would seem undercut
merely by the fact that when the family traveled to Salzburg in 1950, Maria
held a personal reunion with the Mother Abbess.)
What was undoubtedly true, however, was that Maria was far more
enthralled with the beautiful countryside outside of Salzburg than she was
with life in the abbey. Possessed of great natural beauty, ringed by
snowcapped mountains, and nestled in Austria’s lake district, Salzburg, or
more particularly the surrounding environs, provided a setting in which
Maria immediately felt at home. Escaping to the mountains every chance
she 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 have
it, she actually did whistle and sing within the abbey walls, and the details
of her personality paint her as a remarkably unpromising candidate for the
quiet life of a nun in a cloistered abbey. Tales abounded of one nun who had
not 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 to
drink in the surrounding natural beauty. Penance for looking out the
window took the form of kissing the floor, and Maria would simply save
time by kissing the floor first and then look out the window. This action
found its way into The Sound of Music via Maria’s confession regarding
Sister Berthe: rather than follow Sister Berthe’s instruction that she kiss the
floor after committing a transgression, she figured she would break another
rule sooner rather than later, so saved time by kissing the ground at the mere
approach of Sister Berthe. In the words of Johannes von Trapp: “My mother
was absolutely unsuited for a contemplative life in the abbey. I suspect the
nuns were happy when the position opened up in our father’s house.”
Nonnberg would never be quite the same again thanks to the unruly
Maria, 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 candidate
to tutor Captain Georg von Trapp’s young daughter Maria. (Maria’s
suitability as a teacher might have been recalibrated if the captain had ever
been able to hear The Sound of Music’s assistant director Georg Steinitz,
who held a nodding acquaintance with her; Maria had taught Steinitz’s
mother before entering the abbey, and in Georg’s chuckling recall, his
mother termed Maria “an awfully strict person—a dominating person. My
mother felt her religious beliefs were close to what we would today call
fanatical.”)
A captain in the Austrian Navy and a decorated hero from his service
during the First World War, by this time Georg von Trapp had suffered
monumental losses in both his private and professional lives. When Austria
lost the war it lost its entire coastline, and his job as a naval captain ceased
to exist. Georg then lost his wife, Agathe Whitehead, to scarlet fever in
September 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 whose
money buoyed the family’s fortune; her grandfather had invented the
modern torpedo), Georg was overwhelmed with his duties as a single parent
and looking for assistance. While both the screen and stage versions of The
Sound of Music depict Maria as governess to all seven children, she was
hired simply as a tutor to young Maria, whose own bout with scarlet fever
had left her too weak to walk the four miles to school every day. Perhaps
because young Maria spent more time with her twenty-one-year-old tutor
than any of the other six Von Trapp children, she was able, late in life, to
offer up the sharpest, most clear-eyed assessment of her tutor turned
stepmother: “She needed, all the time, excitement, so she created
excitement. 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 the
villa in Aigen in late summer of 1926 seems to mirror the film’s depiction
of a satchel-swinging, guitar-toting Julie Andrews so accurately that it
seems to have directly inspired the film’s costume designer, Dorothy
Jeakins. Wrote Maria: “My satchel looked exactly like the bag of a horse-
and-buggy doctor.” Even Maria’s unattractive dress in the film (“The poor
didn’t want this one”) seems to have been inspired by Maria’s actual
garment; 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 from
how it is depicted in the film. The captain executed a slight bow toward
Maria, 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, Captain
von Trapp actually used the bosun’s whistle only to locate his children on
the grounds of his rather large estate. But the seven children really did wear
sailor suits and, for moviegoers around the world who carry the image of
seven children summoned by their father’s whistle marching down the stairs
to meet their new governess, Maria’s recall of the event matches the film in
surprisingly close fashion: “Led by a sober-faced young girl in her early
teens, 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 until
the day she died at age ninety-nine, daughter Maria retained the ability to
play every one of the seven signals. In Agathe’s recollection: “We loved our
signals.”
In reality, Georg was a warm and loving if somewhat overwhelmed
father. It was actually Maria herself (called “Gustl” by the children), with
her emotionally stunted upbringing, who needed thawing. Starved for
affection, a woman/child who had literally grown up without being kissed,
she found herself willing putty in the hands of the youngest children. For
those who find the film’s connection between governess and children too
precious for words, the reality actually proved even more deeply emotional:
“I grew up without being kissed.… 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.” Small wonder, then, that Maria later wrote in her
autobiography: “Only one thing is necessary to be happy … and that one
thing is not money, nor connections, nor health—it is love.”
If it is a universal truth that every person alive has, at one time or
another, felt misunderstood, underappreciated or in need of love, then in
Maria’s very real recollection of Johanna’s kiss lies a key to the film’s
extraordinary success: more than the romance between Maria and the
captain, the love story at the heart of The Sound of Music is the one between
Maria and the children. Indeed, Maria herself publicly and repeatedly
acknowledged that she fell in love with the children quickly, but only grew
to love Georg after their marriage.
In that light, it makes sense that the captain’s marriage proposal proved
far more prosaic in real life than in the film’s depiction of a moonlit song in
a romantic, waterside gazebo. As related by her granddaughter, Maria was
standing on a stepladder polishing a chandelier when the children ran in to
the room crying out, “Poppa says he will marry you.”
In the recollection of Agathe von Trapp, her father asked her: “Do you
think I should marry Gustl? You know, she’s quite pretty.” Agathe
answered: “I think if it is the will of God then you should marry her.” It
was, in fact, Agathe who late in life offered the most judicious explanation
of Maria’s marriage to Georg. Did Georg love Maria at the time of the
marriage? Agathe responded thoughtfully: “I can’t say I know it or I don’t
know it … but since he did what he did he must have liked her. But the way
I saw it, I think she was providential, to be our second mother.”
Said third oldest child Maria: “When she first came it was heaven on
Earth. We took to her quickly. She sang, she knew new songs.… But I
wanted 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.… But
that was not possible. We never talked about this of course. We just let it
happen.”
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 Superior
told Maria that marriage to the captain and mothering his seven children
represented the will of God, Maria found “All my happiness shattered, and
my 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 prospective
bride displayed a less-than-thrilled reaction at the very prospect of
marriage. Not exactly the stuff of Rodgers and Hammerstein songs. But the
magic of any tale lies in the way it is told, and in the decades’ later hands of
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Wise, and Lehman, the lives of Maria and Georg
von Trapp were turned into popular art that appealed to the entire world.
Did the family only begin singing after Maria arrived on the scene? The
actual chronology here becomes a little fuzzy; it is unquestioned that Maria
brought a guitar with her, but while some recollect that the children were
already singing before Maria’s arrival, in Maria’s own words: “They didn’t
sing. I couldn’t understand this. It was the first thing we did. We started
singing.” On the other hand, in daughter Maria’s recollection, the Von
Trapp 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 Georg
was very musical, teaching Rupert and Maria the accordion, Johanna the
violin, and Agathe herself the guitar. There was, in her recollection, no
question about it: singing and the playing of instruments began long before
the 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 a
repertoire by the time Gustl arrived in our home.”
Regardless of when the children actually began singing, after Maria’s
marriage to the Captain took place on November 27, 1927, at Nonnberg
Abbey, the vocalizing remained an intrafamily affair until the mid-1930s,
when the family’s entire life was upended with the arrival of Father Franz
Wasner.
In theory, Father Wasner had simply come to the von Trapp villa to live
in a rented room and say mass in the family chapel. In reality, he ended up
changing the lives of every member of the family. It all started simply
enough when, after listening to the family sing, Father Wasner told them
that they sounded quite good but could sing even better. Conducting from
his seat, he insisted that the family repeat a motet until it sounded exactly
right. 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 our
lives.… None of us knew then just how lucky we were: this was the birth of
the Trapp Family Singers.” The entire Sound of Music global phenomenon
had begun with one single word: but.
In the first movie version of the Von Trapp saga, the 1956 German
language film Die Trapp-Familie, Father Wasner plays a central role as the
musical taskmaster responsible for molding the Trapp Family Singers. By
the time The Sound of Music hit Broadway three years later, he had been
jettisoned by librettists Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, who decided
that his presence would undercut Maria’s role as musical tutor. In 1930s
Austria, however, Father Wasner actually formed a very close alliance with
Maria, with the priest dictating the family’s musical direction while Maria
rather willingly fulfilled the role of entrepreneur, cajoling and pushing the
family to fame.
So intertwined did the twosome become that in 1935 they actually
collaborated on a love song entitled “Zwei Menschen”—“Two People”—
with Father Wasner the composer and Maria the lyricist. Exactly how close
was their relationship? Sympatico enough to write a song with translated
lyrics that prove decidedly unexpected from a collaboration between a
priest and a former novice:
Two people walking under the starlit moon
The apple trees are in bloom
The petals are falling on their heads like snow
The bells are ringing in the distance
When interviewed for a 2012 documentary, Father Wasner’s nephew
commented on the fact that Maria and his uncle were genuinely kindred
spirits; born in the same year and raised in similar hardscrabble
circumstances, each was firmly dedicated to music and the church alike.
The two wrote “Zwei Menschen” in the year they met, and in the words of
Wasner’s nephew: “They both probably had unfulfilled dreams.… It’s an
expression 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 it
necessary to leave Austria, accompanying the Von Trapps to the United
States in the 1930s, where he continued as the driving musical force behind
the Trapp Family Singers for two more decades. After the family stopped
performing in 1956, Maria and Franz went their separate ways; Franz spent
five years as a missionary on Fiji, followed by time in the Holy Land and a
stint as rector of a seminary in Rome. Upon retirement, he returned to
Salzburg where he lived until his death in 1992.
Maria and Franz were not reunited until 1983, when Maria made a final
trip to Salzburg while the Vermont family lodge was being rebuilt after a
devastating fire; the footage of their reunion reveals a duo so simpatico that
it seems as if they are picking up a conversation they had finished five
minutes earlier. As they finished each other’s sentences and filled in
missing bits of recollection, it was easy to fully comprehend Maria’s
statement: “He slowly but surely molded us into a real musical entity—an