The true story behind ‘The Sound of Music’
Movies based on real events can often be filtered through several different mediums before making it to the silver screen, which was entirely true of the classic song-and-dance spectacle The Sound of Music. Robert Wise’s feature was derived from the 1959 stage musical of the same name with music and lyrics from the legendary Rodgers and Hammerstein, which was itself based on the memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, written from the perspective of the family and the events they lived through.
An era-defining favourite that would shatter records and notch countless accolades, The Sound of Music won Academy Awards for ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’ amongst five wins in total. It also cemented Julie Andrews as an indisputable superstar after the previous year had seen her headline Mary Poppins in her first-ever film role.
Refitting the experiences of a close-knit family and the effect World War II had on them into a whimsical, all-ages romp bursting with wit, warmth, and colour was no easy task. However, it was accomplished with the greatest of ease by the creative team, thanks in large part to having both the musical and the memoir to draw on for inspiration.
While nobody was expecting The Sound of Music to be a 100% accurate recreation of the Von Trapp family’s trials and tribulations, it nonetheless remained largely true to life. As depicted on-screen, Maria did marry Georg von Trapp and began touring Europe as a collective dubbed ‘The Von Trapp Family Choir’.
In 1938 they fled Austria after the Nazis annexed the country before seeking safe haven in New York City, where they’d perform their first show in the Big Apple in December of that year. In the broadest strokes, it’s heavily biographical, but there were naturally some creative and artistic flourishes made along the way.
For one thing, Christopher Plummer’s Georg was depicted as a lot colder than his counterpart, while Maria herself was known to have a temper, not that anybody would have guessed from Andrews’ relentlessly upbeat and optimistic performance that positively radiates sunshine throughout every single frame. Having their lives transformed into a box office sensation and awards season darling probably wasn’t even that much of a surprise for the von Trapps, considering their story had already done huge numbers on Broadway.
There were several notable deviations, though, with Maria tutoring one of the Von Trapp children as opposed to being a governess for them all, while she married Georg 11 years before they fled Austria and not in the time immediately preceding the Nazi occupation. Neither did she marry out of love, as she revealed in her autobiography Maria.
“I really and truly was not in love. I liked him, but I didn’t love him. However, I loved the children, so in a way, I really married the children,” she wrote, indicating that it was never realistically incorporated into the movie. There weren’t seven children, either, but an even ten, with many names, ages, and other details changed.
It wasn’t a beat-for-beat biopic, then, but neither was The Sound of Music particularly far-fetched. Based on both its initial reception and its status as a cinematic classic, it would be fair to say the film hit the perfect sweet spot.
