‘The Sound of Music’ at 60

The current national tour of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s beloved 1959 show “The Sound of Music” has been playing to full houses. The live production’s enduring appeal serves as a reminder of the stir the 1965 film version caused, quickly becoming a phenomenon of its time.

Directed by Robert Wise and starring Julie Andrews as Maria von Trapp, the movie was as instantly popular as “Gone With the Wind” had been 26 years earlier and “Titanic” and the Harry Potter franchise would be decades later.

After the passage of 60 years, moreover, several of the score’s songs are by now so familiar that they seem embedded in our cultural DNA. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that Pope Leo XIV, the first Baby Boomer pontiff, recently included “The Sound of Music” on his short list of four pictures he regards not only as favorites but as “significant works.”

Whether on stage or screen, however — papal endorsement notwithstanding — this recounting of the early years of the Trapp Family singing group gives short shrift to their Catholic faith. Their devotion gets reduced to novice Maria’s convent sisters singing about solving the problem she presents and a stout mother abbess advising her to “Climb Every Mountain.”

This neglect, of course, simply reflects the nature of show business, then and now. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II were used to sanding off any coarse or inconvenient edges they might find in their source material. So Catholic piety was never going to be treated seriously in their mostly-breezy retrospective.

Yet there’s no indication that Catholics were any less pleased with the film than the public in general. As for the U.S. church’s official source of cinema commentary at the time, the National Legion of Decency, it commended the movie as “thoroughly refreshing family entertainment” and praised its “joyful and balanced view of life.”

Several prominent secular critics disagreed and even sneered at the production. In McCall’s Magazine, for instance, Pauline Kael retitled it “The Sound of Money” and labeled the picture “a sugar-coated lie.”

Writing in Vogue, Joan Didion observed that it was “more embarrassing than most, if only because of its suggestion that history need not happen to people … Just whistle a happy tune, and leave the Anschluss behind.” New Yorker critic Kenneth Tynan called the Broadway production the collaborators’ “Great Leap Backwards” in style.

But audiences, interpreting the film through the prism of their own lives and emotions, responded with a stubborn affection that was initially downright giddy. “The Sound of Music” eventually became the highest-grossing film of the year — and one of the most profitable movies ever made.

Deeply rooted Catholic spirituality wasn’t the only aspect of the tale to be tidied up in Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s book. Thus the real Maria observed to a reporter in 1978, “I was a wild creature. Julie Andrews and Mary Martin (who played her on stage) were gentle – like girls out of Bryn Mawr.”

While there’s emotional resonance in the film’s final scene of the clan hiking across the Alps after Baron Georg von Trapp refused to serve in the navy of the Third Reich, moreover, that isn’t how it really happened. Since the baron had Italian citizenship, the entire family took a train to Italy, where he then wired their American agent to book passage to England and the U.S.

That’s not to say, however, that their exit from Austria wasn’t a potentially dangerous political statement in the circumstances. As Maria later recalled, the baron understood all the risks, and told his children, with regard to their future, “I’d rather see you poor but honest.”

Following their arrival in the New World, the family settled in Stowe, Vt., where they first ran a music school and then, beginning in 1950, a resort that continues to operate to this day. Their parish in Stowe, Blessed Sacrament, was originally a mission of the Catholic church in nearby Morrisville. But Maria was influential in changing its status.

In an interview with OSV News, Father John Schnobrich, Blessed Sacrament’s current pastor, noted that the baroness was largely responsible for the construction, in the late 1940s, of the parish’s church.

Accomplishing this required “interceding with the bishop… and the (then) pastor from Morrisville, Father Francis McDonough, who served the Stowe community. After the completion of Blessed Sacrament in 1949, the von Trapps would be at Sunday Mass in the first two rows in front of the pulpit.”

Blessed Sacrament is connected as well as dedicated to another interesting historical figure, Servant of God Joseph Dutton (1843-1931). Born on farmland where the church now stands, the Civil War veteran converted to Catholicism in 1883, and worked alongside St. Damien of Molokai and St. Marianne Cope serving the lepers on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.

“He was there for 44 years, and the von Trapp family singers actually went to his graveside on the island of Molokai and sang there,” Father Schnobrich said. Dutton’s cause for canonization was opened in 2022.

Maria Augusta Kutschera, as she was born, was forthright about her faith journey. Although baptized a Catholic, she was raised as the ward of a socialist uncle who hated all religion and considered herself an atheist for a time before entering the Abbey of Nonnberg, a Benedictine convent in Salzburg, in 1924.

After developing health issues, she left the convent to become a tutor for Maria, one of the widowed baron’s seven children, who was recovering from scarlet fever at their mountain villa in Aigen. Following her permanent withdrawal from religious life, the elder Maria married the baron in 1927, and had three children with him.

Contrary to his depiction on stage and celluloid, the baron had enjoyed music even before Maria’s arrival in his life. So, after losing its money in a bank failure, the aristocratic clan started singing Austrian folk songs and antique madrigals professionally in 1934, later touring throughout Europe and eventually the United States.

Their subsequent rise to celebrity status doesn’t seem to have dimmed the family’s faith. In fact, in 1955, after the group stopped performing, Maria and children Rosemarie, Maria and Johannes became lay missionaries in Papua, New Guinea.

There, on Fergusson Island, where she worked for 30 years, the younger Maria left another legacy: a choir that sings the von Trapps’ arrangements of liturgical music.

Before her death in 1987 at age 82, Maria von Trapp was a welcome speaker at meetings of Catholic organizations in the United States. Those expecting the gossamer manner and sweetness of Julie Andrews instead received a rousing rallying cry of the old school.

In 1980, for example, the Clarion Herald, the newspaper of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, covered a speech the baroness had given in the city. “She sees the babysitter as ‘the tragedy of our time,'” it reported. “Time and again I say, ‘Get the mothers back in the home.'”

In an interview, she called divorce “about the worst that can happen… but it’s almost a matter of everyday life now. It’s very tragic.”

She also said abortion “tells you much about the attitude toward children. We are killing millions of children, and people are considered stupid if they don’t have an abortion. This will draw the wrath of God on the nation… with abortion, nothing is sacred, nothing is holy.”

In 1966, while the popularity of the film was at its peak, the baroness told the convention of the Los Angeles Diocesan Council of Catholic Women that her assigned topic, “The Apostolate of the Laity,” could be covered succinctly: “Find out the will of God and then go and do it.”

She added, “The secret of finding the will of God is to be quiet. If we shut off the television and the radio and listen in silence, we will always hear the voice.”

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