Salzburg, Day two "THE SOUND OF MUSIC TOUR"

Today we journeyed to many of the places where the movie was filmed in 1965.  

The von Trapp family had no control over how they were depicted in the film and stage musical, having given up the rights to their story to a German producer in the 1950s who then sold the rights to American producers. Robert Wise met with Maria von Trapp and made it clear, according to a memo to Richard Zanuck, that he was not making a "documentary or realistic movie" about her family, and that he would make the film with "complete dramatic freedom" in order to produce a "fine and moving film"—one they could all be proud of.

Georg Ludwig von Trapp was indeed an anti-Nazi opposed to the Anschluss, and lived with his family in a villa in a district of Salzburg called Aigen. Their lifestyle depicted in the film, however, greatly exaggerated their standard of living. The actual family villa, located at Traunstraße 34, Aigen 5026, was large and comfortable but nowhere near as grand as the palace depicted in the film.

Georg is referred to as "Baron" in the film, but his actual family title was "Ritter" (German for "knight"), a hereditary knighthood. Austrian nobility, moreover, was legally abolished in 1919 and the nobiliary particle von was proscribed after World War I, so he was legally "Georg Trapp". Both the title and the von particle, however, continued to be widely used unofficially as a matter of courtesy.

Maria was born on 26 January 1905 aboard a train heading from her parents' village in Tyrol to a hospital in Vienna, Austria.  She was an orphan by her seventh birthday. She graduated from the State Teachers College for Progressive Education in Vienna at the age of eighteen, in 1923. She entered Nonnberg Abbey, a Benedictine monastery in Salzburg, as a postulant, intending to become a nun. 

In 1926 while still a schoolteacher at the abbey, Maria was asked to teach one of the seven children of widowed naval commander Georg Johannes von Trapp.  His wife, Agatha Whitehead, had died in 1923 from scarlet fever.

Eventually, Maria began to look after the other children, as well. Georg von Trapp, seeing how much she cared about his children, asked Maria to marry him. Frightened, she fled back to Nonnberg Abbey to seek guidance from the Mother Abbess. The Mother Abbess advised Maria that it was God's will that she should marry the Captain; since Maria was taught always to follow God's will, she returned to the family and told the Captain she would marry him. She later wrote in her autobiography that on her wedding day she was blazing mad, both at God and at her husband, because what she really wanted was to be a nun: "I really and truly was not in love. I liked him but didn't love him. However, I loved the children, so in a way I really married the children. I learned to love him more than I have ever loved before or after."

Maria and Georg married on 26 November 1927. They had three children together: Rosmarie (born 1928 or 1929), Eleonore (born 1931), and Johannes (born 1939), who were the others' half-sisters and half-brother.

The beautiful Bavarian Mountains on the way to 

the lake where the scenes of Maria and the children falling out of the boat were shot

the company worked at Schloss Leopoldskron and an adjacent property called Bertelsmann for scenes representing the lakeside terrace and gardens of the von Trapp villa.

the Gazebo which was built for Liesl and Rolf's "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" and filmed here, was bought by the owner's of Schloss Leopoldskron.  They thought it looked nice in their garden.  After the film was released, tourists, who learned of its whereabouts, came from all over wanting to see it.  The owner's got so tired of tourists tramping on their property, that they donated it to the city and it was restored and moved to Hellbrunn Palace.

The house is behind us

On our way to the next location we passed by  

the Fortress Hohensalzburg

In this field below the fortress and all alone stands a small house.  It once belonged to the hangman of Salzburg and nobody wanted to live next to him.  So to this day, the house stands alone.

Scenes were shot at Frohnburg Palace which represented the front and back façades of the villa (an entirely different location, which we saw, but did not visit today.

Hellbrunn Palace (we will come back here later for a look at the "trick fountains")

The Sound of Music gazebo at Hellbrunn Palace in Salzburg was moved here from its original location at Schloss Leopoldskron.

a beautiful setting for the Gazebo

Nonnberg Abbey - It was founded ca. 714 by Saint Rupert of Salzburg and is the oldest women's religious house in the German-speaking world. Its first abbess was Saint Erentrudis of Salzburg, who was either a niece or a sister of Saint Rupert.

The abbey's endowment was provided by Theodbert, Duke of Bavaria, and augmented by Emperor Henry II, who was also Duke of Bavaria.

The abbey was independent of the founding house from 987 and was re-built in about 1000. This building was largely destroyed in a fire of 1423. Reconstruction took place between 1464 and 1509. In 1624 the church was enlarged by the addition of three side chapels. A refurbishment in the Baroque style took place in the 1880s.

Through Maria Augusta Kutschera, later Maria Augusta von Trapp, who was a postulant in the abbey after World War I and whose life was the basis for the film The Sound of Music, the abbey has acquired international fame.

On the way to the church where the wedding scenes were shot in Mondsee.

The beautiful mountains and lakes of Austria

 

Basilica Mondsee (the wedding scene church).  Maria and Georg were actually married in the Salzburg Cathedral in 1927.  

This church provided the picturesque setting and the ability to film the wedding procession down the aisle that the director was unable to get at the cathedral.

Lest you missed it the first time.  Maria and Georg married for practical reasons, rather than love and affection for each other. Georg needed a mother for his children, and Maria needed the security of a husband and family once she decided to leave the abbey. "I really and truly was not in love," Maria wrote in her memoir, "I liked him but didn't love him. However, I loved the children, so in a way I really married the children." They were married in 1927, not in 1938 as depicted in the film, and the couple had been married for over a decade by the time of the Anschluss and had two of their three children together by that time. Maria later acknowledged that she grew to love Georg over time and enjoyed a happy marriage.

Coffee and strudel at the Cafe Braun

The beautiful lake at Mondsee

Back in Salzburg at Mirabell Palace Gardens - 

another film location where the children danced around this fountain

and up these stairs singing the "Do Re Mi" song

"Salzburg dwarf garden".  It is a display of grotesquely deformed dwarfs, some of shich actually lived on the coourt of the Prince Archbishops of Salzburg.  The Zwergerlgarten was originally built under the reign of Prince Archbishop Franz Anton Harrach in 1715, but re-modeled since then.

this is the one that the children and Maria patted on the head as they danced by

the rose arbor

Just call me Maria

After performing at a festival in 1935, they became a popular touring act. They experienced life under the Nazis after the annexation of Austria by Germany in March 1938. Life became increasingly difficult as they witnessed hostility towards Jewish children by their classmates, the use of children against their parents, the advocacy of abortion by both Maria's doctor and by her son's school, and finally by the induction of Georg into the German Navy. They visited Munich in the summer of 1938 and encountered Hitler at a restaurant. In September, the family left Austria and traveled to Italy, and then to the United States. The Nazis made use of their abandoned home as Heinrich Himmler's headquarters.

In the film, the von Trapp family hike over the Alps from Austria to Switzerland to escape the Nazis, which would not have been possible; Salzburg is over two hundred miles from Switzerland. The von Trapp villa, however, was only a few kilometers from the Austria–Germany border, and the final scene shows the family hiking on the Obersalzberg near the German town ofBerchtesgaden, within sight of Adolf Hitler's Kehlsteinhaus Eagle's Nest retreat. In reality, the family simply walked to the local train station and boarded a train to Italy. Although Georg was an ethnic German-Austrian, he was also an Italian citizen, having been born in the Dalmatian city of Zadar, which at that time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and later fell into Italian territory after World War I. From Italy, they traveled to London and ultimately the United States.

In the 1940s, the family moved to Stowe, Vermont, where they ran a music camp when they were not touring. In 1944, Maria and her stepdaughters, Johanna, Martina, Maria, Hedwig, and Agathe applied for U.S. citizenship. Georg never applied to become a citizen. Rupert and Werner became citizens by serving during World War II. Rosemarie and Eleonore became citizens by virtue of their mother's citizenship. Johannes was born in the United States in September 1939, during a concert tour in Philadelphia.  Georg von Trapp died in 1947 in Vermont after suffering lung cancer.

Maria von Trapp died of heart failure on 28 March 1987 in Morrisville, Vermont, three days following surgery.  Maria, her husband Georg, and four of her stepchildren (Hedwig von Trapp, Martina von Trapp, Rupert von Trapp, and Werner von Trapp) are interred in the family cemetery at the Lodge.

The film was a popular success in every country it opened, except the two countries where the story originated, Austria and Germany.  In these countries, the film had to compete with the much-loved Die Trapp-Familie (1956), which provided the original inspiration for the Broadway musical, and its sequel Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika (1958)—both films still widely popular in German-speaking Europe and considered the authoritative von Trapp story.   Austrians took exception to the liberties taken by the filmmakers with regard to the costumes, which did not reflect traditional style, and the replacement of traditional Austrian folk songs with Broadway show tunes.  The film's Nazi theme was especially unpopular in Germany, where the Munich branch manager for 20th Century Fox approved the unauthorized cutting of the entire third act of the film following the wedding sequence—the scenes showing Salzburg following the Anschluss. Robert Wise and the studio intervened, the original film was restored, and the branch manager was fired.  The Sound of Music has never been popular in Austria and Germany.