Other editions of book The Story of the Trapp Family Singers

The story of a remarkable singing family and of its devotion to an ideal. This is the adventurous story of one of the most distinguished musical families of the age, the Trapp Family Singers. It is told by one who knows it best, the head of the family, Baroness Maria Augusta von Trapp herself – now Mrs. Trapp, for she and her family have become American citizens. The story begins in Austria after the First World War, in which the baron distinguished himself as a submarine commander. A widower, he had five daughters, two sons, and no one to look after them; and from a neighboring convent he obtained as governess, a young student – Maria. The Baron was expected to marry a certain Princess Yvonne, but so impressed was he with Maria that he proposed to her instead, and they were married. In the dark days of the failure of the Austrian banks which inaugeated the world wide depression, the Baron lost most of his fortune. At that time they met Father Wasner, who has been their musical director ever since, and they started doing professionally, and with amazing success, what they had done previously for their own amusement. The book has much in it of the complexities of life of a large family, the arduous discipline of musical training, the amusing incidents of travel en masse. But The Story of the Trapp Family Singers is more than a dramatic personal story. It is specifically an American one, since it tells of a transportation from the Old World to the New.

This book is a personal family history of the Trapp Family Singers. It begins with Maria's days in the convent, traces the migrations of the family during the War years, and finishes in their family home in Vermont. Ever since seeing The Sound of Music for the first time, I have always been curious about what happened next- -did the entire family manage to safely climb the Alps to freedom? How did they pay for their journey to the US? And what connection do they have to the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vermont? Maria Trapp answers all of these questions in this book. While the musical version of their life did convey many of the main episodes, the storyline of the musical compressed these episodes so that they seemed to happen one after the other: Maria leaves the convent, teaches the children how to sing, marries their father, and they flee the country at the outbreak of the war, all within 2 hours. Phew! Like the musical, this book also starts with Maria's last day in the convent, but more than a year passed before she and the Baron were married, in 1927. They were married some 12 years and had 2 additional children along the way before leaving Austria. Yes, as unknowns, the family did win a song festival, but that was in 1936, and by the time they fled Austria, they were already quite well-known and had toured Europe as a family singing group. Indeed, one additional reason for leaving the country when they did was that they had been invited to sing at Hitler's birthday. When driving past the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, I have always thought of it as a ritzy place, and assumed that the money to purchase it and develop it had come from the Baron's family fortune. In reading this book, I found that that was not the case at all.(amazon customer)

The Sound of Music, based on the lives of Maria, the baron, and their singing children, is as familiar to most of us as our own family history. But much about the real-life woman and her family was left untold. Here, Baroness Maria Augusta Trapp tells in her own beautiful, simple words the extraordinary story of her romance with the baron, their escape from Nazi-occupied Austria, and their life in America.

Lippincott Hardcover w/d.j. - blk/white photographs & blk/white drawings by Trapp Family. 309 pages - Copyright 1949, Eighteenth Printing, June 1966. - The story begins in Austria after the first World War, in which the Baron distinguished himself as a submarine commander. A widower, he had five daughters, two sons and no one to look after them; and from a neighboring convent he obtained as governess a young student Maria. Included are photos of the family, the Baron and Maria.

While The Sound of Music was generally based on the first section of Maria's book The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (published in 1949), there were many alterations and omissions. Maria came to the von Trapp family in 1926 as a tutor for one of the children, Maria, who was recovering from scarlet fever, not as governess to all the children. Maria and Georg married in 1927, 11 years before the family left Austria, not right before the Nazi takeover of Austria. Maria did not marry Georg von Trapp because she was in love with him. As she said in her autobiography Maria, she fell in love with the children at first sight, not their father. When he asked her to marry him, she was not sure if she should abandon her religious calling but was advised by the nuns to do God's will and marry Georg. "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. . . . [B]y and by I learned to love him more than I have ever loved before or after." There were 10, not 7 von Trapp children. The names, ages, and sexes of the children were changed. The family was musically inclined before Maria arrived, but she did teach them to sing madrigals. Georg, far from being the detached, cold-blooded patriarch of the family who disapproved of music, as portrayed in the first half of The Sound of Music, was actually a gentle, warmhearted parent who enjoyed musical activities with his family. While this change in his character might have made for a better story in emphasizing Maria's healing effect, it distressed his family greatly. The family did not secretly escape over the Alps to freedom in Switzerland, carrying their suitcases and musical instruments. As daughter Maria said in a 2003 interview printed in Opera News, "We did tell people that we were going to America to sing. And we did not climb over mountains with all our heavy suitcases and instruments. We left by train, pretending nothing."