Rivermaya's Coffee Corner

Here’s the REAL scoop on the singing von Trapps, the clan immortalized in The Sound of Music. The real Maria was a taskmaster with a volatile temper–her demands made many of the von Trapp children miserable for years.

Georg von Trapp, born in 1880, became a national hero as a captain in the Austrian navy during World War I. He commanded submarines with valor and received the title of “Ritter” (the equivalent of the British baronet or “Sir,” but commonly translated as “Baron”) as a reward for his heroic accomplishments.

Georg married Agathe Whitehead, the granddaughter of Robert Whitehead, the inventor of the torpedo, in 1912. They had seven children together: Rupert, 1911–1992; Agathe, 1913– ; Maria, 1914– ; Werner, 1915– ; Hedwig, 1917–1972; Johanna, 1919–1994; and Martina, 1921–1952. After World War I, Austria lost all of its seaports, and Georg retired from the navy. His wife died in 1922 of scarlet fever. The family was devastated by her death and unable to bear living in a place where they had been so happy, Georg sold his property in Pola (now Pula, Croatia) and bought an estate in Salzburg.

The von Trapps never saw much of the huge profits The Sound of Music made. Maria sold the film rights to German producers and inadvertently signed away her rights in the process. The resulting films, Die Trapp-Familie (1956), and a sequel, Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika (1958), were quite successful. The American rights were bought from the German producers. The family had very little input in either the play or the movie The Sound of Music. As a courtesy, the producers of the play listened to some of Maria’s suggestions, but no substantive contributions were accepted.

How did the von Trapps feel about The Sound of Music ? While Maria was grateful that there wasn’t any extreme revision of the story she wrote in The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, and that she herself was represented fairly accurately (although Mary Martin and Julie Andrews “were too gentle-like girls out of Bryn Mawr,” she told the Washington Post in 1978), she wasn’t pleased with the portrayal of her husband.

The children’s reactions were variations on a theme: irritation about being represented as people who only sang lightweight music, the simplification of the story, and the alterations to Georg von Trapp’s personality.

As Johannes von Trapp said in a 1998 New York Times interview, “it’s not what my family was about. . . . [We were] about good taste, culture, all these wonderful upper-class standards that people make fun of in movies like ‘Titanic.’ We’re about environmental sensitivity, artistic sensitivity. Sound of Music simplifies everything. I think perhaps reality is at the same time less glamorous but more interesting than the myth.”

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