Sixty years since the hills came alive: The Sound of Music story

It was the last and many would say the best stage musical composed by the legendary team of composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein who had been responsible for smash hits such as Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, and The King and I.

After tryouts in New Haven and Boston, on November 16, 1959, The Sound of Music was added to their list of fame, opening at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre on West 46th Street in the heart of Broadway. The original production starred as Maria one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s regulars, Mary Martin – she was 45 playing a 20-something but did so brilliantly – and the Austrian-born Theodore Bikel as Captain von Trapp.

The songs – Edelweiss, My Favourite Things, Climb Ev’ry Mountain and the title song among the best of them – became immediate hits and have stayed popular ever since.

We won’t insult you by repeating the plot but it goes something like this: widowed Austrian navy captain employs trainee nun as governess to his children, they fall in love, marry and run away with their children from the nasty Nazis. What’s not to like about that?

BUT WAS IT TRUE?

PRETTY much, as the musical was adapted from Maria von Trapp’s memoir of the family. Maria really was an orphan and a postulant at Nonnberg Abbey who was sent by the Abbess to look after the seven children of widower Georg von Trapp, an eminent naval commander who was 25 years older than her. He fell in love with Maria and they were married in 1927, but she was never that much in love with him as she really did want to be a nun – much later in life she would become a missionary in Papua New Guinea. Still, they had three more children together, and Maria did indeed form them into a small choir which moved from the amateur ranks to professional performances when the family’s bankers went bust in 1936. They became a popular act but the Anschluss of Austria and Germany in 1938 saw the Nazis come after George and the family fled via Italy – not via Switzerland or the mountains – and the UK to the US where they were again a popular act as the Trapp Family Singers.

HOW WAS THE MUSICAL RECEIVED?

RAPTUROUSLY by the public and mostly with approval by the critics. The New York Journal’s critic was a Rogers and Hammerstein expert who wrote: “It seemed to me to be the full ripening of these two extraordinary talents.”

The often ferocious critic Walter Kerr wrote in the New York Herald Tribune: “Before The Sound of Music is halfway through its promising chores it becomes not only too sweet for words but almost too sweet for music”, and he added that the “evening suffers from little children”.

Mmmm ... rather missed the point, Walter. The professionals on Broadway did get the point – The Sound of Music won five Tony awards and was nominated for others, while the public away from New York began clamouring for touring productions.

Sadly, Oscar Hammerstein died of stomach cancer at the age of 65 just nine months after The Sound of Music opened. The last song he ever wrote was Edelweiss.

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?

THE public flocked to see it, and the original production ran for 1443 performances. The original Broadway cast album sold more than three million copies. The London production opened on May 18, 1961, at the Palace Theatre and ran for 2385 performances.

Since then there have been numerous revivals across the globe, the 1981 version in London starring Petula Clark, Michael Jayston and Honor Blackman setting the record for the biggest advance sale of tickets in British theatrical history.

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OF COURSE, WE’VE ALL SEEN THE FILM ...

THERE are quite a few middle-aged Scots who are word perfect on the movie having been dragged to see it at multiple matinees by their mothers and aunties ...

Starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, the film mostly stuck to the theatrical version but director Richard Wise conflated the timings of events for dramatic purposes, and Richard Rodgers added two songs that he wrote himself, I Have Confidence and Something Good.

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The Sound of Music duly won the 1965 Best Picture Oscar and it broke box-office records worldwide. Adjusted for inflation, it remains in the top five of the highest-grossing films of all time, and the soundtrack has sold more than 20 million copies.

ANY SCOTTISH CONNECTION?

JUST a dubious one. More than 20 years ago, the Tartan Army supporting Scotland’s national football team adopted Doe a Deer – as they call it, the song title is actually Do-Re-Mi – as one of their songs at a match in Austria. Allegedly one newspaper preview said the fans of Scotland liked to sing so “let’s hope we hear the sound of music”. The Tartan Army duly obliged and have sung it ever since.