Sixty years after the film’s release, Salzburg is embracing a Hollywood classic it once kept at arm’s length
Prefer the Guardian on Google Let’s start at the very beginning – famously, a very good place to start.
Just two decades after the second world war, a Hollywood crew descended on Salzburg with stars, show tunes and a compelling, essentially true story of love and opposition to Adolf Hitler: The Sound of Music.
The Austrian city, still economically and morally devastated from the Nazi period, wasn’t quite ready to receive them.
Although director Robert Wise was free to make use of the glorious Alpine settings and the old town’s historical facades, scenes such as soldiers marching across the central Residenzplatz under swastika flags made municipal authorities deeply uneasy.
When the film premiered in 1965, it ran for a couple of weeks, closed for lack of ticket sales and largely disappeared from local memory. That is until the tour buses started coming.
View image in fullscreen Kym Karath, Debbie Turner, Angela Cartwright, Duane Chase, Heather Menzies, Nicholas Hammond, Charmian Carr and Julie Andrews in The Sound Of Music.
Most Austrians – and Germans – still have never seen the five-time Oscar-winning film starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer.
But a new museum in Salzburg dedicated to the movie and its real-life anti-Nazi family of singers now aims to reconcile the global cultural touchstone with its long ambivalent home town.
The road to Austria’s growing embrace traversed dramatic hills and valleys only the budding nun Maria and her cherubic band of charges could properly serenade.
“Beneath all the kitsch, this is also a film about resistance,” co-curator Matthias Bergsmann said on a tour through the exhibition. “It was about saying no to national socialism. And about a family who said: if we stick together we will abide, and music will save us. For all its beautiful images and songs, the film has depth.”
View image in fullscreen Curator Matthias Bergsmann in the Sound of Music museum , Salzburg.
The nearly three-hour opus was rarely shown on Austrian television until a special screening last Christmas for the 60th anniversary. The dubbed film, known as Meine Lieder – meine Träume (My Songs – My Dreams), remains obscure in Germany as well.
The 1959 Broadway musical and subsequent film were based on a popular memoir by Maria von Trapp. In it she described how as a spirited young novice, she was hired by Georg von Trapp, a widowed father who had been a submarine commander in the Austro-Hungarian navy, to care for his seven children.
Trying circumstances and proximity soon gave way to love.
The Nazi annexation of Austria led the family, who had already started performing together in the 1930s, to flee their homeland. Moved by fierce opposition to Hitler as well as financial concerns, they left everything behind to begin new lives in the US as professional troubadours.
View image in fullscreen The von Trapp family in The Sound of Music, 1965.
Bergsmann said the reasons for the cold shoulder in Austria were not as simple as embarrassment over the Nazi period, particularly considering the glut of second world war films produced in German in the ensuing decades.
“At the time, it was perhaps simply too early to tackle this subject in this way seen as sentimental. Perhaps the wounds were still too deep, or the process of coming to terms with the past was only just beginning.”
He said Salzburgers also quibbl…