THE VON TRAPPS
One Family’s Lasting Overture
I’m on my way to have lunch with Johannes von Trapp, the youngest sibling of the famous singing von Trapps, the Austrian family on whom the blockbuster musical, The Sound of Music, was based. Twelve von Trapps settled in the picture-postcard town of Stowe, Vermont, after the family left its home in Salzburg more than 80 years ago. “Sure, I’d love to show you around,” Johannes had told me when we spoke on the phone.
Now 81 and nearing retirement, Johannes still helps oversee the Trapp Family Lodge, the resort the family built up in northern Vermont after arriving in the US.
I’ve come prepared. As I drive through the forested mountains, I slip The Sound of Music into my car’s CD player. Within seconds, I am singing – off key, as usual – along with Julie Andrews: “The hills are alive with the sound of music. With songs they have sung for a thousand years …”
I spot a sign for the Trapp Family Lodge, which sits on a steep hillside. Minutes later I meet Johannes, who is tall, lean and blue-eyed. It’s easy to imagine him when he was younger, decked out in Austrian garb, singing along with his brothers and sisters.
He smiles graciously when I confess how I’ve been mangling the lyrics of the musical that made his family world-famous. “We get a lot of that up here,” he tells me as we each sip on a von Trapp Dunkel lager in the von Trapp Brewery and Bierhall.
Johannes says that some of the movie’s more zealous fans come to the Alpine-style family hotel expecting to be greeted by seven children singing ‘Do-Re-Mi’. As he explains, “The musical is 60 years old but we still get visitors coming into the lobby and asking, ‘Where are the singing von Trapp children?’”
He laughs and adds, “It’s as if they believe we never grew up or were frozen in time.”
As if on cue, a visitor comes to our table and gushes to Johannes, “The Sound of Music is my favourite movie of all time,” and asks for an autograph and a selfie.
“See what I mean,” Johannes tells me as he smiles broadly. “At least he didn’t ask me to sing.”
The Sound of Music has been called “the world’s favourite musical”. On the release of the movie in 1965, the Hollywood Reporter described it as “one of the all-time great pictures
[ that] restores your faith in movies.” The film won five Oscars, its soundtrack has sold 20 million copies worldwide, and it has been seen by a mind- boggling one billion-plus people. Today, it is the most viewed movie musical and third most successful film of all time, after Gone With the Wind and Star Wars.
While countless books, articles and documentaries have been produced about The Sound of Music, less has been revealed about the real-life Austrian family on which the movie was based. In the film, Captain Georg von Trapp, a highly decorated Austrian naval hero, is reluctant to let the children sing in public, but in reality, he and his second wife, Maria, formed a singing group, the Trapp Family Choir, that toured Europe in 1937 and 1938.
In both the film and real life, the anti-Nazi von Trapps left Austria af ter the Anschluss, when Germany annexed Austria. Georg had been instructed to accept a German naval commission, and the family decided to leave their homeland. As Georg tells Maria in the movie, “To refuse them would be fatal … and joining them would be unthinkable.”
But in the movie’s famous final scene, nine von Trapps* are shown hiking through the Alps on their way to Switzerland. “The family *The movie version featured only the seven children that the captain had with his first wife; he had three more with Maria.
members did indeed escape from Hitler and the Nazis in 1938, the year before I was born,” says Johannes, “but they merely boarded a train in Salzburg and made their way to Italy and eventually America.”
I ask, “So the climactic scene didn’t really happen?”
“Let’s just say that was the Hollywood version,” Johannes says with his blue eyes sparkling. “If our family had walked over the mountains from Salzburg they’d have ended up in Berchtesgaden, Germany, close to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest mountaintop retreat!”
He pauses for a beat, smiles warmly, and adds, “But it makes for a more dramatic story, doesn’t it?”
Dr amat i c i ndeed. But so is the family’s real-life, post-Europe story. After leaving Austria while Maria was pregnant with Johannes, the von Trapps arrived in the US in 1939 with less than four dollars. Georg had lost his fortune in a bank failure, but the family prospered on an extended concert tour across America.
Audiences loved the Austrian family wearing their native costumes and performing their traditional music. As The New York Times noted, “There was something unusually lovable about this little family aggregation.” In time the entire 12-member family would become “the most heavily booked at tract ion in US concert history.”
In 1942 the family settled in Stowe, a ski town and summer resort established in 1794. They bought a tumbledown farmhouse and 270 hectares of land that boasted drop-dead views of Vermont’s Green and Worcester mountains. It reminded them of Austria.
Two of the brothers, Rupert and Werner, joined the US Army and served in the 10th Mountain Division as ski troopers. Other family members married and moved away; one worked as a teacher, another became a missionary, another a doctor.
Georg died in 1947 and the Trapp Family Singers finally disbanded in 1956 after performing in more than 2000 concerts throughout 30 countries. The family members who remained in Stowe helped Maria run the 27-room family home and lodge.
To help support the family after her husband died, Maria wrote a family biography and sold the rights for less than US$10,000 to a German publisher, who made two movies about the family. That publisher in turn sold the rights (for much more) to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein as the basis for their Broadway musical, The Sound of Music, which premièred in 1959, ran for three years and won five Tony Awards. Then in 1965 came the Hollywood version of the musical.
As Johann e s remembe r s , “Everything, and I mean everything, changed!” Thanks to its worldwide success, the von Trapps, especially
Maria, who was portrayed by Julie Andrews in the film, became instant celebrities. The lodge prospered.
Until she died in 1987, Maria was the public face of the family, granting countless interviews and appearing on television specials. “She was the driving force that kept us together through the hard times,” says Johannes. Mary Martin, who played Maria on Broadway, said of her, “The family didn’t just climb that mountain to escape. She pushed them, all the way up.”
As I join Johannes for a walk around the grounds of the lodge, which was rebuilt after the original burned down in 1980, he admits that the publicity generated by the movie was, and is, “a mixed blessing”.
He explains, “Don’t get me wrong, The Sound of Music is a fabulous movie, a tour de force that resonates with lots of people, but it doesn’t really accurately represent who my family was. My father, for example, was not the stern, demanding martinet portrayed in the film. He was much more loving, informal and caring. And the music we performed was, well, a bit more sophisticated than ‘Doe, a deer, a female deer.’”
The lodge’s piano player knows to keep an eye out for Johannes, who has warned him, “Please no ‘Do-Re-Mi’ or ‘Edelweiss’ when I’m around.” Guests often request songs from the musical, and the pianist will oblige. However,
if he spots Johannes he will quickly switch to playing ‘Desperado’ by the Eagles, his favourite, or another tune.
“It’s not that I hate ‘Do-Re-Mi’,” says Johannes with a wry smile. “I’ve just heard it a million times.”
All of Johannes’ siblings, except his sisters Rosemarie, 91, and Eleonore, 88, who live locally, have passed away. He has run the lodge since 1969. “I never wanted to turn this into a Sound of Music theme park,” he says. “I’ve tried to make it express my family’s tastes and values.”
True to his roots, Johannes built a cross- country ski centre at the lodge and established a successful $15 million brewery that offers classic Austrian, South German and Bohemian beers. “I knew we couldn’t rely forever on the movie to keep bringing us paying guests,” he explains.
Johannes recent ly handed off much of his management responsibilities to his son Sam, daughter Kristina and her husband Walter Frame. The siblings decided to establish a history tour that tells the story of both the family and the movie. “I grew up with a ‘too cool for school’ attitude about the movie and kept it at arm’s length,” admits Sam, 47. (He has seen it only two times.) “But it didn’t take me long to realise how important the movie is to so many people.”
He remembers an airline employee who recognised his name and told him how The Sound of Music had influenced him to leave a lucrative job and return home to take care of his ailing mother. “He said that the movie had shown him how important the love of family was,” says Sam.
“We hear sentiments like that all the time. It never fails to amaze us that this movie, and our family’s story, has had such a hugely positive influence on people. It showed us that being a von Trapp is a privilege.”
While the movie may lure some people to the lodge, the family banks on customers returning year after year because of the property’s outdoor offerings, from mountain biking to cross-country skiing to hiking. The lodge is jam-packed with memorabilia of the family and The Sound of Music, and the gift shop sells everything from Edelweiss jewellery to Trapp Family Farm maple syrup.
Tourists invariably ask, does Sam or his sister sing? Sam, an accomplished skier and former fashion model, winces a bit and says, “My father and mother are great singers. Me, not so much.”
Sitting in the crowded Bierhall, Johannes admits that he has changed his opinion of The Sound of Music over the years. “I’ve mellowed,” he explains. “I realise the film wasn’t meant to be a realistic history of my family, and I’ve come to appreciate that it expresses universal themes such as love of country, love
of a man and a woman, love of family and so much more. And it has meant so much to so many people.
“There’s a story I tell …” He stops mid-sentence, wipes a tear from his eye and explains, “Every time I tell this story, I tear up a bit. Sorry.”
Johannes was visiting his mother, Maria, at the Trapp Family Lodge on an autumn afternoon in the 1970s. They were sitting on her balcony, which looked out onto the family’s private cemetery some 60 metres away.
He continues: “We had recently fenced off the family cemetery because visitors had trampled the flowers. Suddenly, I saw a man climb over the fence and thought, Not again! What’s he doing?”
He pauses once more, blinks back a tear and explains, “I realised he was wearing a service dress white uniform. He was a US Navy officer. He went up to my father’s grave, stood there at attention and saluted. He held his salute for a moment, slowly lowered his arm and then did an about-face. Then he climbed back over the wall and walked away.
“I was incredibly moved. In fact, I was speechless,” remembers Johannes. “But I soon realised that if it had not been for The Sound of Music, my father’s story wouldn’t be as well known as it was then and continues to be. It also proved to me that there are people who respect my family for what we are and what we’ve done. That means the world to us.”