The Story of the Trapp Family Singers

by Maria Augusta Trapp

  Slowly I wound my way home. It was a moonless night, and when I walked along the river, which I could not see, but only hear, the words of the psalm came to my mind: “The dark waters of the bitterness of exile threatened to drown me.”

  The children must be in bed by now, I thought, when I opened the big house door as quietly as possible to slip in unnoticed. But there stood the Captain.

  “Well, and…” was all he said.

  Timidly I went over; and all of a sudden there came all the tears I hadn’t found before.

  “Th-they s-s-said I have to m-m-m-marry you-u!”

  Without a word he opened his arms wide. And, what else could I do—with a wrenching sob I buried my face on his shoulder….

  The next day after breakfast their father told his children that they had been right; only if he married me I should have to stay forever. And for that reason he was going to marry me. It was touching and heartwarming to feel behind all the kissing and squeezing that followed, the genuine joy and relief of the children—my children.

  Soon afterward the Captain left for a long journey which would keep him away until fall. He explained to me that he had to do this; otherwise, people would talk.

  “Talk? About what?” I said.

  “Well, about us.”

  “But why don’t they talk now?” I wanted to know.

  But the Captain was somewhat mysterious, and insisted that it was for the best. If he and I had only known how terribly busy many tongues had already been all these days.

  “I shall come back two weeks before the wedding. Then you will go to Nonnberg, where we shall meet again on our wedding day; and then I shall never leave again,” he added almost passionately.

  And he was right. Everything worked out fine. Through the summer months the children and I grew closer together every day. And the figure of their father grew more and more distinctly into my life with every letter I received from him. It was a happy and peaceful time.

  The leaves turned yellow and red, and the first heavy autumn storms shook them from the trees. The Captain came back, and I learned to call him Georg. Then I went for the last time into my beloved convent for a ten-day retreat to get prepared for matrimony, which is a great sacrament indeed.

  It was the Saturday before the first Sunday in Advent, November 26, 1927. When the great day finally dawned, I greeted it with a heart full of happiness and readiness to “serve God where He needed me most—wholeheartedly and cheerfully.” I was dressed in my bridal gown in the same vaulted room where I had spent the happiest years of my life so far. My three former roommates, now in the white veil of the novices, helped me dress. Frau Rafaela put the wreath of Edelweiss on the white bridal veil, and then the wonderful bells of Nonnberg began to call. It was time to go down into the church. The whole community accompanied me, and for the last time I walked down the age-worn stairs, over the cobblestoned yard, passing by the old statues, through the cloisters where the Sisters were lined up for a last farewell. On Reverend Mother’s hand I approached the heavy portal. As it opened, I knelt on the threshold for the last time, for the last blessing. Outside the procession had formed. Through swimming eyes I saw a packed church. Oh, and here were the children. The two oldest girls were leading their father, who was in his Navy uniform. The two boys waited for me, and the three little ones busied themselves with my long train. At this moment the big organ began with a jubilant chord. Slowly and solemnly the procession marched up the aisle and up the many steps into the sanctuary, where Father Abbot stood waiting for us, adorned with his golden Ornate. Then the voice of the organ died out, and in the great silence which hovered over the big church, surrounded by the seven children, we promised each other loudly and solemnly to “take each other for better or for worse…till death do us part.”

  VI Feasts in a Family

  AFTER the Christmas vacation life settled down to its normal routine; that is, for the children. But for me everything was new. It was queer—there was the same house and the same people, and still it wasn’t the same. Now they were my children, and I was their mother. There was a world of difference. We all loved each other in a new way, and it was very beautiful. If I had to take the same step now—oh, I am sure I wouldn’t dare. I would see all the dangers and difficulties in taking over the place of a second wife and second mother. I would be very doubtful whether all seven children would ever take to me. I wouldn’t feel adequate to take over so much responsibility—I simply wouldn’t dare. But at twenty you are beautifully unconscious of possible complications.

  Everybody went to school, even Maria, who was well again—except little Martina, who was too young. Quietly she followed me around the house until I settled down to some letter-writing or mending or embroidering. Then, contentedly, she would nestle at my feet. Quite undemonstrative with her affections and emotions otherwise, she poured all the love of her young heart into a family of little dwarfs she owned. There was a mother dwarf, a father dwarf, and a little child dwarf, from ten inches down. They looked ancient and sorrowful, and Martina was inseparable from them.

  “Hedwig’s and Johanna’s dolls,” she insisted, “are silly. But my dwarfies know everything.”

  Everyone was anxious to have all his homework done before supper, because then came the most beautiful time of the day, the evenings spent together. A fire was lit in the fireplace. The older girls brought their knitting, the younger ones, their dolls or dwarfies; the boys and their father usually worked on wood, carving or whittling; and I, settling in a most comfortable chair, started to read aloud. It is most amazing how much literature you can cover during the long winter evenings. We read fairy tales and legends, historical novels and biographies, and the works of the great masters of prose and poetry.

  After having read a couple of hours, I would say: “That’s enough for today. Let’s sing now; all right?”

  That was the signal for everyone to drop whatever he was doing. We sat closer together and started out. First we sang rounds. You can do that for hours on end, and it is a wonderful schooling for the ear. It leads quite naturally to polyphonic music. The rounds teach you to “mind your own business” sing your part, never to mind what your neighbor sings.

  After the First World War the Catholic Youth Movement sweeping all over Austria and Germany had done a wonderful job for music. These young people were fed up with glee club stuff, with all that coy, sweetish, unnatural material which was sung everywhere. They wanted genuine music again. They went up and down the countryside, collecting real folk songs and folk tunes, delved into archives and libraries and copied unpublished music of the old masters, the great unknown ones. In mimeographed and hand-copied sheets this music went from town to town and brought about a radical change in musical life within a few short years.

  I was lucky enough, in my student years, to belong to one such group of young ones. Boys and girls didn’t “go steady” at that time. We met in large groups of thirty or forty and had the most wonderful time doing things together. A large portion of our free time was spent with music. Out of the enthusiasm of those hours blossomed beautiful settings of the melodies we brought home from our hikes through the mountains, for two, three, four, and five parts, a cappella and with the accompaniment of instruments. There were violins and cellos, French horns, and clarinets, and there was the newest and oldest of them all, the revived recorder, the ancient flute. There we sat together by the hour, singing and playing and enjoying ourselves thoroughly.

  How grateful I was now for those experiences! Sitting around the table, we worked on at least one new number every evening. If we had more than three parts, I had to take the tenor part, while my husband took care of the bass. How I wished in the depths of my heart that one of the boys would kindly turn into a tenor later; lo and behold—one of them did!

  There came a time when we hardly got around to reading or singing together because we were so busy, and that was the birthday season. In a large household there are a number of family holidays which occur ye
arly; the birthdays and feastdays. In our particular family we have two distinct seasons: from the end of January to the beginning of May, and then again from the end of September to the first of November. My people had only celebrated the birthdays, whereas we on Nonnberg disregarded those and only celebrated the feastdays. These are celebrated on the feast of the Saint in whose honor you are named. Now we put both customs together and, since there were nine of us, there were eighteen holidays right away. It was a matter of course that the lucky one whose holiday came around could expect a present from everyone in the house; and of course, one didn’t just go to a store and buy with cold money something turned out by a factory with no relationship at all to the young sister or brother. How could you possibly get for any money that particular dwelling Martina’s dwarfies needed, a cross between a foxhole and a little cave, interwoven with roots, with a carpet of moss, with furniture made of spruce twigs!

  A loving heart and gifted fingers can produce a wonderland of little miracles, especially after the room next to the library has been turned into a workshop with work benches, a band saw, a lathe, and a circular saw.

  All great feasts of the Church have a Vigil; they start, so to speak, the evening before. So our family feasts were celebrated on the evening before, too. The birthday cake with the candles was put in the center of a table, which was also covered with all the different presents. While I was going to fetch the lucky hero of the day, the others lined up in a semi-circle, each one holding a flower. The moment we entered the room they started singing “Hoch soll er leben!” the Austrian equivalent of “Happy Birthday to You.”

  The Birthday Child went now from one to the other and was kissed, wished a happy birthday, and presented with a flower. It may come from the flicker of the little candles which mirror themselves in the eyes of a happy child—but there is always something like a faint flavor of Christmas around such a birthday celebration. There is an old belief that if you think hard of a wish and then blow out all the candles on your cake with one breath, the wish will come true. Now the presents are discovered and admired and each giver is found out, which means renewed kissing and hugging. Then he or she is made master of ceremonies for the next twenty-four hours. That means the menu for three meals and the plans for “what to do tomorrow after school is over.”

  The feastdays were a little less elaborate. There was no cake with candles, the presents were arranged around one’s plate at lunch; but the kissing and hugging and having a good time were the same, because the root and source of all happiness, that warm love, was the same.

  Besides the family feasts which recur every year, there are others which come only once in everybody’s life. There are the “firsts”: your first school day, the First Holy Communion—in a few years it will be the “lasts”: graduation from grade school, from high school, from college. But whatever the day may be, it is turned into a feast only by that genuine affection of which a large family is a real powerhouse. If people would only understand that you cannot buy feasts with money. They must come out of your heart, out of that love which makes one inventive. I don’t want to say that money must necessarily spoil a feast. If used rightly, it can enhance it and add a good deal to it; but only—and this is very important—if it comes on top of the other, never as a substitute. The foundation has always to be this mutual fondness without which there can be no festive spirit. A birthday table can be laden with flowers from the fields and presents made with the clever fingers of your children, the monetary value of which is only cents, but which to you are priceless.

  Weeks passed and turned into months. The time between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday is celebrated in Austria, as in all other Catholic countries, as a carnival. Festivities of all kinds and sorts are going on until Fasching Dienstag (Mardi Gras), when the last ball is stopped sharp at midnight and the season of Lent begins. At least, so it was before the war.

  We didn’t feel much of Fasching that year. My husband had never been a friend of official entertainments; big parties with all that goes with them had always scared him. He also didn’t want to be told by any Emily Post what he had to do and when and where. In spite of the rule book which required a newly married couple to make the rounds in society after so and so many weeks, we hadn’t paid a single visit to society; and as society was strictly prohibited by that same book from paying us the first call, there simply were no calls; no five o’clock teas, no formal dinner parties. Surrounded by an ocean of social activities, we lived on an island all by ourselves.

  On Fasching Dienstag, however, we had our own party. At lunch it was announced that there would be a costume ball in the big living room, beginning at six. The festive dinner would be at seven-thirty. Of course, the afternoon was free, and all over the house one could hear the tapping of busy feet, bumping of doors, and, as the afternoon progressed further, gales of laughter.

  When I came down at seven o’clock, trying to look as Chinese as possible in that beautiful costume which my husband had brought from Hongkong some years ago, complete with shoes and ornaments for the hair, I was almost run down by an ill-mannered sailor, who should not have been admitted in the first place, I thought sharply. Tattooed all over, hands, arms, neck, chest—and you saw a good portion of it, too, through the net shirt—his hat on one ear, smelling of tobacco, he tried to whisper lovely things into my ear. I was a little bit annoyed. Georg should not have invited strangers to this home party. And it took me a long time to discover my dearly beloved husband behind the dirty sailor boy.

  The party was such a huge success that we laughed ourselves almost sick. There were the three little bears with paws and snoots and all, uncannily well reproduced with camel’s hair blankets and cleverly worked papier-maché. They could eat out of your hands, they could dance, they were very cute and very fresh if you didn’t give them a penny each time they begged.

  We danced the Walzer, Polka, Sir Roger, Ländler, and other folk dances.

  When the clock struck twelve, the gramophone was stopped in the middle of a waltz. We said one “Our Father” aloud together and wished each other a blessed season of Lent.

  Lent, the six weeks’ preparation for Easter, is very rigorously observed among the country people in the Catholic countries. On purpose I don’t say simply “in the Catholic countries,” because the big cities have shed all these peculiarities in order to be admitted into the big-city corporation around the world. The national costumes they exchanged for street clothes worn the same in Paris, London, New York, or Shanghai on their respective Fifth Avenues; folk dances were replaced by international ballroom dances; and instead of folk customs—the century-old voice of your own people informing you what your forefathers did at certain times and what you should imitate—they have books now, the Emily Posts of the respective countries, giving minute instructions on what to wear if you want to be called “smart,” how to behave if you want to be “socially acceptable.”

  The people living in the country still celebrate Lent as it was understood by the many generations since the beginning of Christianity: by voluntary penance and mortification we should participate in the sufferings of Christ in order to be able to celebrate also the day of Resurrection together with Him. We should die to our old sinful self and rise as a new man. To this end fasting is one of the oldest precepts. In Poland, Italy, some valleys of Austria, and especially the Balkan countries, the fast is most conscientiously observed. One meal a day only, and no animal products: no meat, no fish, no eggs, butter, cheese, or milk.

  Of course, when Easter comes and these goods are back on the table again, the stomachs feast and celebrate together with the souls, sometimes so much so that a doctor is needed. The money which is saved by fasting goes to the poor, and the time which is saved is invested in prayer. Ancient devotions like the Stations of the Cross are much practiced. Pilgrimages are undertaken, and the soul, sobered and helped by the bodily chastisement, finds easier the access to heavenly things.

  Some time before Ash Wednesday my husba
nd and I were figuring out what we should do together with the children during the Season of Lent.

  “You know what I really miss?” he said to me. “Catholics don’t read the Bible as much as Protestants do. I wish that my children would get thoroughly acquainted with Holy Scriptures.” (My husband had joined the Church only a year before I had come into the family.) “Let’s start them with the New Testament and let’s read it together every evening until Easter. And I guess I’ll give up smoking,” he continued, and this grave announcement was followed by a sigh which seemed to come up from the depths of the earth, because he was a heavy smoker.

  Generosity calls for generosity.

  “Then I won’t even look at candy or any pastry,” said I, and my sigh wasn’t a bit different, because mine is a sweet tooth.

  “We shall leave it to the children to choose their own mortifications,” said Georg; and it was interesting to see what followed. One saw the whole character in the making from the way each one reacted.

  There was the practical-minded little one: “I shan’t pinch Johanna and I won’t spit at Werner—until Easter,” and it was very hard to convince her that this was by no means a superman’s generosity, but merely her duty.

  One of her older sisters, the warm-hearted, enthusiastic type, said: “I shall carry the little ones’ school bags, I shall eat no dessert at all, I shall say three rosaries a day, and…” she also was hard to convince that the more resolutions you make, the less chance there is that you keep any.

  It turned out to be a beautiful six weeks. The reading of the Gospels together proved to be wonderful. It proved to be the Book of Books, the only one in the whole world to which a four-year-old girl would listen with enraptured interest, while all the philosophers are not yet able to get to the bottom of its divine wisdom.

  Then Holy Week was close at hand, with Palm Sunday ushering it in; we made little excursions into the woods and came home with armloads of pussy willows. With the help of small branches of boxwood and fir twigs they were arranged into nice, round bouquets, fastened to a stick about three feet long. From the workshop we got nice, curly wood shavings, which were dyed blue, red, and yellow with Easter-egg dye, and hung all over the bouquets. They looked lovely and cheerful, and on Palm Sunday the church was a sight. Hundreds of children, each one with his Palmbuschn, jealously rivaling his neighbor’s in beauty. They were blessed in a special solemn way by the priest in remembrance of the palm branches which were used to make Christ’s entrance into Jerusalem such a triumphant one.