Memories Before and After the Sound of Music Read online

  The gala performance was to be the next evening, March 12, so my family arranged a wonderful birthday lunch for that day at a Russian restaurant, the Firebird, near the hotel. It was a quaint and cozy little place with a doorman in formal Russian attire at the entrance. To my great surprise, Johannes gave me a birthday toast. I did not expect this honor, and I was deeply touched.

  That evening we were taken to the Martin Beck Theatre in a limousine. When we arrived, the sidewalk was filled with people who were coming to the performance. The crowds were pushed to the sides to let us enter. The reporters squeezed through the crowd, and we saw flashes of light all around us from the cameras. To my surprise, I heard a reporter call my name. He turned out to be Chris Olert, whose siblings Mary Lou had taught in our kindergarten. He was then working as a journalist in New York City.

  We were seated near the front of the theater; the house lights dimmed, and the show began to the delight of the audience. During the intermission, I was asked to go up to the first balcony. It was difficult to get through the crowds, so Hans took me by the hand and plowed through the throngs and landed me at the right spot on the balcony. A surprise awaited me. I could not believe it, but there it was! A little boy in a sailor suit presented me with a huge birthday cake, iced with the words “Happy 85th Birthday.” After the intermission, Hans escorted me safely back to my seat for the rest of the performance, which was a great success and received a standing ovation.

  Following the show, a dinner was planned at the Tavern on the Green for the cast and invited guests. There was so much noise in the restaurant, with everyone celebrating the opening night, that I could hardly understand what anyone said, but it was all very wonderful.

  Another special event connected to The Sound of Music took place on December 2, 1998. We von Trapps were invited to New York City to receive the Golden Decoration of Honor from the state of Salzburg for our Austrian Relief efforts following World War II. This lovely medallion is the highest honor bestowed by the state of Salzburg. The movie “children,” who were also not children anymore, were presented the Mozart Medal for the part they played in The Sound of Music, which had brought an increase in the number of tourists coming to Salzburg. This December evening was the first time, since the movie came out in 1965, that we had come face-to-face with those who had portrayed us.

  Two years later, another special occasion would bring me closer to my counterpart from the movie, Charmian Carr, who played the oldest von Trapp daughter. When her book, Forever Liesl, came out in the year 2000, Charmy came to Baltimore for a book signing, and we had dinner together. After introducing me to her audience, she read excerpts from her book, followed by a book signing. To my surprise, the people wanted my autograph too. Charmy and I sat side by side signing books. This evening was another moment when The Sound of Music touched me with its warmth.

  After meeting so many people over the years who told me how they had derived such great enjoyment and inspiration from the musical and the movie, I finally came to terms with The Sound of Music. I thought, Who am I, then, to criticize this movie? After a long inner struggle, I finally learned to separate the memories of my life from the screenplay. I began to see that while all the details may not be correct, the creators of The Sound of Music were true to the spirit of our family’s story. That freed me from my resentment and made it possible for me to enjoy the play, the movie, and the music as others have. I have even learned to sing and play “Edelweiss”!

  Where Are the “Children” Now?

  This question often comes from people who visit the Trapp Family Lodge. Oh, yes, the “children.” It almost sounds like an afterthought. Where are they? What are they doing now that there are no more concerts to be sung?

  It seems as though time has stood still. After twenty years of giving concerts throughout the Western world, we are still the “children.” Why are we still thought of as children, although most of us were already grown up when we left Austria in 1938 to venture into the New World? Only the two youngest members of our family, Rosmarie and Lorli, were children at that time.

  Year after year, from 1936 on, we gave concerts and traveled together from October until Christmas and went on tour again after Christmas until the end of May. This sameness of constantly being together as a family may have created even in us the feeling that we were still children.

  As long as we gave concerts, we lived and worked together. When this phase of our lives ended in 1956, each of us had to find his or her own way of making a living. We had to part.

  After Rupert returned home from the war in 1945, he realized that he needed to leave the singing group to follow his chosen profession. He had completed his medical studies at the University of Innsbruck before we left Europe. He knew that if he wanted to practice medicine in the United States, he would have to receive a medical degree and do his internship in this country. He left home to attend the University of Vermont School of Medicine. He became a family doctor and married Henriette Lajoie, the daughter of a Franco-American attorney. They lived in Rhode Island and raised their six children there, all of whom are now married and have their own families. When Rupert retired, he moved back to Vermont, where he died in 1992 at the age of eighty; he is buried in our family cemetery.

  Johanna discovered one day that she was already twenty-seven years old; her dream of becoming the mother of a large family of her own would slowly slip away if she remained in the singing group. In 1948 she married Ernst Florian Winter, whose father had been a city official in Vienna. Johanna became the loving mother of her large family of seven children. She died in Vienna in 1994, after all her children were married, and she is buried there with her oldest son.

  Hedwig stayed at the Lodge for a short time after we stopped singing. She then left to teach first in Hawaii, then in a mountain community of Tyrol. When she came back from Austria, her asthma had become so severe that she was too sick to stay at the Lodge and not sick enough to go into a nursing home. She went to stay with Mamá’s youngest sister, Tante Joan, who lived in a lovely little chalet on the lake of Zell am See, next to the Erlhof where Hedwig was born. Hedwig enjoyed a quiet, peaceful life with our aunt until she died of complications from her asthma in 1972.

  Martina was seventeen years old when we left Austria. She wrote beautiful letters to her best friend Erika, who later became Werner’s wife. Among the many guests who came to our music camp, Jean Dupire, a French Canadian, conquered Martina’s heart. In 1949 they were married. When Martina was expecting her first child in April of 1951, she did not come with us on tour after the Christmas holiday but remained at home in Vermont. At that time, several concerts had been scheduled in California.

  While in California, Mother received a telephone call from Stowe with the shocking news that Martina, then age thirty, and the baby had died during the delivery. We could hardly believe it when Mother told us. A silent heaviness settled upon us. We were so far away and could not even go home to lay our sister to rest. We had to give the scheduled concerts. Only Mother went home for this sad occasion.

  Mother’s first child, Rosmarie, felt uncomfortable on stage and left home to pursue other interests. She spent several years teaching in New Guinea. After some searching she eventually joined a religious group, the Community of the Crucified One, and joined a branch of the community in Vermont. There she settled down and started to enjoy life. Rosmarie helped to take care of Mother until her death in 1987 and also nursed a friend of Mother’s until the friend died at the age of 101. Rosmarie now conducts sing-a-longs with the guests at the Trapp Family Lodge, which they enjoy immensely. The booklets that she made for these occasions include some of the songs from The Sound of Music, and these are popular choices of the guests who attend her sing-a-longs.

  Eleonore, known by the family as Lorli, married Hugh Campbell in 1954 while we were still giving concerts. They had met at the music camp in 1947. Lorli and Hugh have seven daughters, who are all married with children of their own. Lorli is a wonderful cook
and the happy grandmother of eighteen living grandchildren. She is also active with groups working to restore traditional family values in Vermont. The Campbell home, in Waitsfield, is a place where their closely knit family often gets together.

  Johannes is president of the Trapp Family Corporation and presides over the Trapp Family Lodge. Johannes and his wife, Lynne, first met when she came to work at the Lodge in the summer of 1967. Lynne Peterson and a group of friends from St. Olaf College in Minnesota waited on tables and then sang and played in concerts for the guests of the Lodge in the evenings. Johannes and Lynne were married two years later in the stone chapel that Werner had built. They have a son and a daughter.

  Werner married Erika Klambauer, Martina’s classmate, whom he had already admired when we still lived in Aigen near Salzburg. Martina invited Erika to visit us in our home in the Green Mountains of Vermont in 1948. Werner and Erika were married that same year, just before her visitor’s visa expired. Werner traveled with us as our tenor until we sang our last concert in 1956, at which time he and Erika already had five children. Erika waited anxiously for him in Vermont while he toured. Werner and Erika left the family property and eventually bought a dairy farm in Waitsfield, Vermont. Erika, who had studied agriculture in Austria, was always Werner’s faithful “right hand.” There, on the farm, they raised their family of six children, and Werner worked the farm until his oldest son, Martin, could take it over.

  In his retirement years, Werner has pursued various artistic endeavors. He began to weave beautiful carpets from the wool of his sheep, using his own designs, and crocheted many warm caps for a Native American mission school. He still improvises on his home organ at the age of eighty-six, while Erika tends her large vegetable and flower garden.

  They are now grandparents of eighteen grandchildren. The four children of their youngest son, Stefan, and his wife, Annie, are showing signs of becoming a second set of Trapp Family Singers. The children, ages eight to fourteen, give concerts and have already made their first CD. I recently attended their first full-length concert in Foy Hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. It was refreshing to hear how well they sang and harmonized. They were a big hit with the audience, receiving two standing ovations.

  The oldest three children of Werner and Erika’s second son, Bernhard, are also very musical. Bernhard’s oldest son is planning to have a musical career and is studying the cello in college.

  Werner and Erika’s second daughter, Elisabeth, embraced music as her profession. Elisabeth has come to be identified as much as an art song singer as a folksinger and has also begun to make a mark with her original compositions. She has given concerts as a soloist across the United States as well as in Canada, Austria, and Russia.

  My twenty-eight nieces and nephews all have interesting lives, but space limitations prevent me from delving into the stories of their families. Therefore, I have mentioned only those who have a musical connection.

  My sister Maria, the second daughter of Georg von Trapp, went to New Guinea as a lay missionary after we stopped giving concerts. She has many wonderful and interesting stories to tell. She worked with local youngsters and also taught English in a mission school. She formed a choir with the schoolchildren who sang beautifully for their church services and other occasions. Maria remained there for thirty-two years with two brief interruptions for vacations in Vermont.

  Now Maria is living in a little house in the woods on the Trapp Family Lodge property. Occasionally she acts as hostess for the guests who want to meet one of the “real” members of the Trapp Family. She loves to play the accordion, which Papá taught her, and she plays for the delight of guests, friends, and family. Her repertoire consists of marches, dances, and songs, some of which she composed. Everyone who meets her loves her. Maria is now in her late eighties.

  You must be wondering what I did after our singing group disbanded. In 1956 I left the Lodge with a friend, Mary Lou Kane, who had worked with us there. Together we started a kindergarten, first in the town of Stowe and later in Maryland. We retired in 1993 after conducting our kindergarten for thirty-seven years. We now share a lovely apartment in the suburbs of Baltimore, Maryland. As retired people seem to be, we are always busy. We enjoy our retirement because we can do things we did not have time to do before.

  Over the years, I turned some of my sketches into watercolors, enough in number to have several exhibits, including one in the Austrian Embassy in Washington, D.C. Many of my paintings were sold, but I kept some that now adorn the walls of our apartment.

  Among other interests, I now spend time writing, making music, singing, playing the piano and guitar, and visiting family members. Looking back, at the age of eighty-nine, I am thankful that my life has been so rich with many unusual and interesting experiences. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

  Each one of the “children” would have enough stories to fill his or her own book. In this book, I can only briefly outline each one’s life. We still keep in touch with one another and get together at the Trapp Family Lodge for weddings, anniversaries, and other special occasions, with Johannes always our gracious host. He makes sure that family members who do not live in the vicinity of Stowe have accommodations at the Lodge for these festivities. Occasionally we get together for an afternoon in Werner and Erika’s home, for a dinner in Johannes and Lynne’s house, or in Maria’s cozy little house in the woods to reminisce and share family news. Invariably someone starts a song, and others join in, one song following another.

  We still sing and sound almost as good as in years past, even though we’re not a full choir anymore. Singing has not departed from our lives, and the sound of our music will never fade away as long as some of us can get together. Yes, we still love to sing.

  Notes

  Chapter One: The Captain, Our Father

  1. Ritter means “knight” and von, which is placed before one’s last name, is an aristocratic title that is bestowed upon a person who has done an extraordinary service for his country or fellowman. Only the emperor can give this title, which is accompanied by an elaborate document.

  2. Pola was the most important harbor in the Austrian monarchy and would become part of Italy after World War I. The city is now part of Croatia, and the spelling has changed to Pula.

  3. Fiume was an industrial city on the Adriatic Sea; it is now Rijeka, Croatia.

  4. This was the beginning of what would later be known as the Boxer Rebellion (1900–1901). The Chinese people involved were called Boxers because they practiced martial arts.

  5. The Chinese government officially supported the rebellion.

  6. Edwyn Gray, The Devil’s Device: The Story of Robert Whitehead (London: Seeley, Service & Co., Ltd., 1975).

  7. Today this home still exists, but our family no longer owns it.

  8. This book, written in German, is currently out of print: Bis zum Letzten Flaggenschuss (Until the Last Salute).

  Chapter Two: Mamá, Our Sunshine

  1. The English equivalent of her name is Agatha, and that is how people in English-speaking countries pronounce it.

  2. A seaside town near Trieste, which at that time belonged to Austria.

  3. The Bosnian soldiers were sent to help at my widowed grandmother’s farm by the Austrian government. This was in gratitude of my grandfather’s contribution to the war effort.

  Chapter Three: Life with Gromi

  1. This castle remains in existence today and is now a cultural center in lower Austria, owned by Gromi’s great-nephew.

  Chapter Five: The Postwar Era

  1. The word Dragoner comes from a certain Hungarian regiment that was known to be ruthless and was called “Die Dragoner.” This name seemed to fit her personality!

  Chapter Six: Years of Change

  1. Mamá died during the late evening of September 2, 1922.

  Chapter Seven: Our New Home Near Salzburg

  1. The park and the Ferris wheel remain in existence today. Even the Nazis left everything intact.

>   Chapter Ten: Adventures with Papá

  1. Boats with a wooden frame covered with rubberized canvas; all could be dismantled, folded, and stored in a bag.

  Chapter Twelve: The Invasion

  1. An aunt of Maria’s classmate who lived near St. Georgen.

  2. A shrine in the vicinity of Salzburg.

  3. Private taxis in Aigen.

  4. A priest at the Boromaeum.

  Chapter Fifteen: Our Green Mountain Home

  1. Dr. Hermann Ritter von Jedina became an attorney for the government of the State of Salzburg.

  2. Every twenty-five years, the Vatican declares a Holy Year to emphasize the Christian way of life. Many people make pilgrimages to pray in Rome at that time.

  Chapter Seventeen: Oh! The Sound of Music

  1. Artistic license won out over historical accuracy as both the play and the movie The Sound of Music were developed. Both are interesting stories, basically true to the spirit of the family, but the fact remains that the story lines depart from the actual events. Briefly stated, here is the evolution of the play and the movie:

  Maria von Trapp published The Story of the Trapp Family Singers in 1949. Hollywood showed interest—but only in the title! And Maria wasn’t interested in an offer only for the title; clearly the whole story was important to her. The German film company to whom Maria sold the rights in 1956, for the paltry sum of nine thousand dollars, made Die Trapp Familie and eventually Die Trapp Familie in Amerika, which were successful in Germany and later in other European countries and South America.

  An American director, Vincent Donahue, saw the first German film and pursued the idea of turning it into a musical for Mary Martin, who then, with her husband, Richard Halliday, and producer Leland Hayward worked out a rights deal with the German producers. They chose Russel Crouse and Howard Lindsay to write the play. They wanted to use primarily music sung by the Trapp Family with one new song written by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. But Rodgers and Hammerstein envisioned a completely new score, and Hayward and Martin agreed. It was, in fact, the final collaboration of Rodgers and Hammerstein, opening on Broadway in 1959, and became the second-longest-running Broadway musical of the 1950s.