From the book The Sound of Music Companion
In honor of the 50th anniversary of the release of The Sound of Music, here are some little-known facts about the von Trapps and the beloved movie musical made about them.
The real Maria was not in love with Captain von Trapp …
… At least not at first. In the movie The Sound of Music, Maria fell for the children and Georg von Trapp simultaneously. But in real life when he proposed, “I really and truly was not in love,” Maria wrote in her 1948 memoir. “I liked him but I didn’t love him. However, I loved the children, and so in a way I really married the children.”
While the von Trapps did walk out of Austria with a knapsack each, they had something valuable waiting for them in America.
They had one thing that most refugees can only dream about: a job. A year earlier, an American impresario had offered the family a chance to sing in New York. In August 1938, each family member packed one rucksack, pretending they were going on a family vacation to Italy.
The von Trapps did not escape Austria by climbing a mountain.
Instead, they calmly boarded a train, which took them into the south Tyrol, part of Italy. It turns out that they did leave in the nick of time—the next day, the Nazis closed the border. The family was always amused that the musical’s creators took them over the Alps to Switzerland: “Don’t they know geography in Hollywood? Salzburg does not border on Switzerland!” Maria told a reporter in 1967.
In real life, Maria von Trapp was the taskmaster, while the Baron was the softy.
Maria set the priorities, managed the finances, and determined the artistic direction of their singing group. She was the martinet, dictating economy, discipline, and focus when they toured. Georg—whose performing role was largely limited to being introduced to the audience before the finale—attended to domestic details and provided moral support.
After arriving in America, the Trapp Family Singers became Columbia’s most successful choral group.
For nearly a decade—from roughly the mid-1940s into the mid-1950s—the von Trapps toured three seasons out of the year. During World War II, they averaged more than 100 U.S. concerts in the a year, earning average fees of $1,000 per concert.
Maria von Trapp ripped up offers to make her story into a musical.
When Maria’s agent was contacted in the late 1950s with an offer to buy the stage rights to her story, the producers didn’t know that Maria had renounced show business in favor of being a missionary in the South Pacific. After they found out, they dispatched countless letters to her; whenever she checked in at mission stations in the remote islands, she kept finding letters from people in America about a Broadway show. She tore then up and concentrated on her vocation. When she returned to America months later, she was startled to be met at the dock in San Francisco by producer Richard Halliday and his actress wife, Mary Martin. To persuade her to sell them the rights, they whisked Maria away to the theater to see Martin perform in Annie Get Your Gun. They were successful: Martin ended up being the first to play Maria von Trapp when the musical opened on Broadway on November 16, 1959.
