Pages from Lehman’s copy of the original play script that illustrate how he immediately began rearranging and eliminating songs. He broke up the song “Do-Re-Mi” into different sections, although he wasn’t quite sure yet what he would do with them.
Lehman did not make these changes lightly. In fact, he had a reputation for being unusually faithful to original material. “I remember one time someone criticized Ernie for changing only nineteen words from one of the shows he was adapting,” recalled Dick Zanuck. “But I thought that was a compliment. Most writers try to put their handprints on the script, but he is smart enough to recognize when something works. That’s one of the reasons I hired him to adapt The Sound of Music.”
Maria’s new family—the real-life von Trapp children.
Robert Wise agreed. “I’ve done a lot of films with Ernie, and one thing I know is he has a lot of respect for the original material.”
Certainly Maria’s story went through many changes as it evolved into an American musical film. The original story, from her book The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, went like this: As a young postulant, Maria leaves Nonnberg Abbey to take a post as teacher to Captain von Trapp’s bedridden daughter. After Maria meets the Captain, he proceeds to call the children in with his boatswain’s whistle. The children—Rupert, Agathe, Maria, Werner, Hedwig, Johanna, and Martina—are just a little too perfect. However, Maria thinks the whistle is a great idea. Maria teaches the children how to sing, and when the Captain comes in and hears them for the first time, he is overjoyed. He even joins in, playing along on his violin. As time goes on, the Captain falls in love with Maria, much to the dismay of his fiancée, Princess Yvonne.
One night the princess comes into Maria’s bedroom and tells her that the Captain is in love with her. Maria wants to go back to the convent right away, but the princess stops her. The princess knows that if Maria left now, the Captain would only fall more in love with her. The princess goes so far as to have a priest come in and speak to Maria to encourage her to stay. The priest tells Maria it is “the will of God” that she remain with the family.
Maria stays at the von Trapps’, but she begins to ignore the Captain, which intrigues him even more. He finally breaks off his romance with the princess, but Maria continues to ignore him. Now that their father is unattached, the children ask him why he won’t marry Maria, but he tells them that Maria doesn’t even like him. The children then run to Maria and ask her if she likes the Captain.
When the children relay to their father that Maria does indeed care for him, the Captain misunderstands, approaches Maria, and says, “The children say that you’ll marry me.” Frightened by the prospect of marriage, Maria runs to the Reverend Mother and asks her if she should marry. The mother says it is God’s will. Maria and the Captain marry in 1927, and in 1929 Rosmarie is born. Then, in May of 1931, Maria gives birth to Eleonore.
As Hitler begins his rampage through Europe, the Captain makes the mistake of taking his money out of a safe bank in England and depositing it all in an Austrian bank owned by a close friend. The Austrian bank folds, and the Captain loses his fortune. Now desperate for money, the von Trapps build a chapel on their property and begin renting out rooms to students of the Catholic university.
One of their guests is Father Wasner, who, with his vast musical knowledge, becomes their vocal director. One day the singer Lotte Lehmann overhears the family singing and insists they perform in the Salzburg Festival. The Captain is aghast at the thought of his family performing in public, but the group, along with Father Wasner, enters the festival and wins first prize. The von Trapps begin singing on Austrian radio and then give their first concert tour in Europe.
Germany takes over Austria, and the Captain is offered a commission in the German navy. Then the eldest child, Rupert, who is now a doctor, receives notice from the Third Reich that there is a job waiting for him in Vienna. As they mull over these two orders, Hitler invites the family to perform for one of his parties. They know they cannot refuse Hitler three times, so they decide to escape. Maria is pregnant with her third child, but still they cross over the Alps into Italy, travel to England, and from there take a ship to America. They begin touring the country, but their stay in America comes to an abrupt halt when their visas expire and they are forced to return to Europe.
The von Trapps begin touring overseas again, but Europe does not welcome them back with open arms. In each country they visit, the officials ask the family to leave after just a few months. It seems no one can understand why Austrians would voluntarily leave their country if they were not Jewish. The Europeans are convinced that the von Trapps must be Nazi spies.
When the family is finally allowed to move back to America, the von Trapps resume their performing. In their travels they come across an old, run-down farmhouse high on a hill in the Green Mountains of Stowe, Vermont. They buy the farmhouse and the acres of property surrounding the home, and they rebuild the farm. This becomes their permanent home and is eventually turned into the vacation and ski resort the Trapp Family Lodge.
Whew! How could all that fit into one movie or play? Wolfgang Reinhardt’s company, Divina Films, had resorted to making two films out of Maria’s story. The German film scripts, credited to Herbert Reinecker with the book by Georg Hurdalek, were closer to her original tale than any of the other versions would be. Still, the writers did fictionalize, and some of these fictional scenes managed to find their way into both the stage play and the American film version. For instance, the German writers created the bedroom thunderstorm scene and a scene where the children perform a shadow play for the princess.
The von Trapps at the family lodge in Stowe, Vermont.
On January 14, 1963, one month after he was hired, Lehman went to see the dubbed Fox version of the German films, which combined Die Trapp Familie and Die Trapp Familie in Amerika. Lehman was not very impressed with The Trapp Family and used the play script and Maria’s book The Story of the Trapp Family Singers for most of his source material. But regardless of where his inspiration originated, Lehman enhanced his reputation for taking good material and making it even better.
For example, Lehman transformed the German film’s shadow play into the marvelous “Lonely Goatherd” puppet show. He also rethought how to convey Maria’s emotional struggle as she leaves the abbey for the first time. In Maria’s book, she recounts that when she left for the von Trapp house she gave herself a mental pep talk, trying to convince herself that this was just a new adventure. In the German film, the writers used narration over the action to communicate her internal monologue. In Lehman’s version Maria’s thoughts were externalized through the energetic charm of “I Have Confidence,” a musical number conceived specifically for the Fox film.
The emotional impact of the final film was due in large part to Lehman’s marvelous job of taking the best from both the German films and the play. In the German film the princess (who became Frau Schraeder in the play and Baroness Elsa Schraeder for the film) tells Maria that the Captain is in love with her. In the play, Brigitta, not the princess, tells Maria of the Captain’s feelings. Lehman had Elsa tell Maria but declined to use the rest of the German story line, in which the Captain, upon finding out what the princess has told Maria, breaks off his engagement. He then rushes up to Maria’s room and stops her from leaving by proposing to her. In Lehman’s version, Maria, alarmed by the baroness’s news, packs her bag and returns immediately to the safety of the abbey.
In The Trapp Family, Maria’s wedding scene is followed by one in which Maria has her first baby. Father Wasner then meets the family and is taken in as one of their own. Next the Captain loses his money, as in Maria’s original story, but the family flees Austria not because the Captain is forced to join the German navy but because he hits a Nazi officer when the officer orders him to raise the Nazi flag.
While Lehman’s job was to expand upon a successful play, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse’s task had been to scale down the German films into play
form for the New York stage. They structured the story line much more dramatically, condensed the time frame of the story, changed events (even going so far as having Maria and the Captain marry at the time of the Anschluss), and ended the play with the family’s escape rather than in Vermont.
Richard Rodgers wrote in his autobiography, Musical Stages, “Howard and Russel tried to steer clear of making [The Sound of Music] one more old-fashioned dirndl-and-lederhosen Austrian operetta, and to keep the plot believable and convincing. Admittedly, it was a sentimental musical, but the truth is that almost everything in it was based on fact. No incidents were dragged in to tug at heartstrings. This, more or less, is what had happened.”
Well … more or less. First of all, the character’s names changed. Maria’s maiden name became Rainer—actually Maria’s mother’s maiden name and the name of her Tyrolean ancestors, who were singers and had toured Europe—and all the children’s names were different.
Second, several of the characters were completely transformed. Rupert, the eldest boy, became Liesl, the eldest, lovesick girl. Lindsay and Crouse then created a romance between Liesl and Rolf, a young Nazi, thus adding even more tension to the story line. The von Trapps’ great friend and music mentor, Father Wasner, became the urbane and cynical Max, who, like Father Wasner, was instrumental in getting the family to perform at the festivals. The play altered a number of other incidents as well, but all these changes created more conflict, the essence of good drama. The Nazi issue, for example, became a strong plot device early in the play, so much so in fact that Elsa and the Captain break up in the play not so much because of his love for Maria but because they disagree politically! By contrast, in the combined version of the German films, the Nazi angle was hardly played up at all. The Nazis are there at the end, of course, to chase the von Trapps up the mountain. But in a story whose entire climax revolves around Hitler taking over Austria, the Nazis are not even a threatening element until the middle of the story.
The other major change in the play was, of course, the music. According to Hugh Fordin’s biography of Hammerstein, Getting to Know Him, Rodgers and Hammerstein began writing the music in March 1959. This was one of the few Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals for which Hammerstein wrote only the lyrics, not the libretto. Lindsay and Crouse wrote up an in-depth outline of the story for Rodgers and Hammerstein to work with. Using those sixty pages, the musical team figured out where to intersperse songs and decided on temporary titles for them. Then they began writing the songs.
Rodgers wrote in his autobiography:
It was essential that we maintain not only the genuineness of the characters but also of their background. “The Sound of Music,” the first real song in the play, was an arm-flinging tribute to nature and music. “Do-Re-Mi” offered an elementary music lesson that Maria employed to ingratiate herself with the von Trapp children. “My Favorite Things,” a catalogue of simple pleasures, had a folkish quality, while “The Lonely Goatherd” and the instrumental “Laendler” evoked the atmosphere of the Austrian Alps. “Climb Every Mountain” was needed to give strength to Maria when she left the abbey and at the end to the whole family when they were about to cross the Alps.
Richard Rodgers wasn’t worried about authenticity. “I didn’t go to Siam to write The King and I, and I didn’t go to Vienna to write The Sound of Music,” he once told Irwin Kostal, who adapted the score for the American film. But Rodgers did strive for a measure of realism in his handling of the Latin chant “Dixit Dominus.” He even contacted the Reverend Mother who was head of the music department at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York, and she generously invited him to a few of her concerts.
Ironically, the one song that everyone thinks is an authentic Austrian folk song is “Edelweiss,” which happens to be the last song Rodgers and Hammerstein ever wrote together. Hammerstein died in August 1960, nine months after the play opened. He knew he was dying when he wrote the number, which makes the simple song about a man’s love for his country even more powerful. The last lyrics Oscar Hammerstein II ever wrote were for the song, but they were discarded from the final version. They went:
Look for your lover and hold him tight / While your health you’re keeping.
Lehman knew all along that the marvelous Rodgers and Hammerstein music was the star of the show. In a March 7, 1963, memo to Willy Wyler, who had not yet been replaced by Wise, Lehman reiterated some of the suggestions Wyler had made upon reading the first thirty pages of the screenplay. “This picture is not to be approached as a ‘play with music.’ It is not to be a picture in which we feel slightly apologetic every time anyone sings. On the contrary, our aim is to be slightly apologetic every time anyone talks.”
Lehman had written thirty pages of the screenplay but then switched over to the outline form so that Wyler would have something to go by when they went to Salzburg to scout locations. Even in this draft, he had already started to add scenes and elements that were not in the play but that gave more depth to the characters and the situations. Lehman began, for example, to toy with the idea of the children’s hostility toward their new governess. The play did not suggest any of this animosity, yet there had to be a reason the children had had so many governesses. He also added a dinner scene in which Maria has her first meal with the family. The German filmmakers had included such a scene, but it had not accomplished much. In Lehman’s outline version he used the dinner table scene to show Maria’s embarrassment at her ignorance of table manners (this was eventually played down in the film) and, again, to add to the hostility, especially Liesl’s, that all of the children initially felt toward their new teacher. The stage version was also a little too politically heavy-handed at times, something Lehman made an effort to play down in the final drafts. But in the outline, some of that heaviness remained.
One scene, which was later excised, is a perfect illustration. At the ball the Captain throws for Elsa, the guests, including Maria, are all sitting down to dinner, and Elsa begins to talk about appeasing the Nazis. Maria cannot resist saying something highly patriotic, and the Captain is obviously moved. The outline also had a somewhat different ending from the final film version. Lehman knew he had to make the climax more suspenseful, so in the outline he added a car chase between the von Trapps and the SS men. Distrustful of their motives, the Nazis escort the family to the concert. On the way, the Captain decides to escape. He tries to lose them, and a chase begins. The family eventually gets out of the car and tries to get lost in the festival crowd, but the SS men quickly surround them. Forced to sing at the concert, they devise another escape and, after the concert is over, try leaving through the abbey garden. Rolf discovers them but, as in the play, he lets them escape, and off to the mountains they go. Later, Lehman would make further changes in these final scenes; in the finished film, of course, there is no car chase, and Rolf does reveal the von Trapps’ presence to the other Nazis. The family is able to make their escape with the help of Sister Berthe and Sister Margaretta.
Lehman’s outline was completed by the end of May 1963. Less than a week later, he and Roger Edens traveled to Austria, where, as discussed in chapter 1, they met Willy Wyler and began looking for locations to use in the movie. They were in Salzburg for fifteen days and scouted approximately seventy-five locations. Despite all the problems Lehman had with Wyler, the scouting trip turned out to be very successful. The beauty and vibrancy of the city filled Lehman with ideas for broadening the stage play, and he found images he would later recapture in his final screenplay. Having seen Salzburg and its environs, Lehman could now begin to envision exactly how he could use “Do-Re-Mi” to advantage.
In retrospect, his conceptualization of the sequence was brilliant. It not only made the song more visually interesting, but by breaking it up into different locales and using different costumes he reached two important objectives. First, he showed the passage of time. The song begins with the Captain leaving for his visit and ends when he comes home with Elsa. This gives us a chance to
see what the children and Maria have been doing together while he is away. Plus, the montage shows the rapport developing between Maria and her charges, who begin by mistrusting her and end up loving her. This was the perfect way to show the gradual change in their attitudes.
Lehman would sometimes develop a number of scenes by first arranging their order and placement. Then he would sit down to write.
“I took pictures with my home movie camera while I was in Salzburg,” recalled Lehman, “and that helped when I got back home. I remember one time my wife and I took one of those carriage rides. That’s where I got the idea for using that in the ‘Do-Re-Mi’ segment.”
One of the first places Lehman and Wyler visited was the Nonnberg Abbey. They wanted to speak with the Mother Abbess about Maria.
“It was like ‘Who’s Maria?’” Lehman recalled of his meeting with the Reverend Mother. “The Reverend Mother hardly remembered who Maria was. Maria had made it seem like she was the most important thorn in their side. I think Maria exaggerated her importance at the abbey enormously in the story.”
Lehman often wrote in longhand on legal-size paper. He’d then give his notes to his secretary, stationed across town at MGM, and she would type them up. This is the writer’s first attempt at the scene that would eventually become “I Have Confidence.”
When Wyler and company returned to L.A. and Lehman recounted his experiences with Willy Wyler for Dick Zanuck, Zanuck immediately began pressuring Lehman to rush through the first draft of the screenplay. Lehman had his outline and first thirty pages of his screenplay, the play script, the Broadway cast album, location photos, and Maria’s autobiography, which had become worn and dog-eared from overuse.
“I was working all by myself in my office,” Lehman recalled. “I never even had a secretary in the next room. It made me uncomfortable. So, even when I was at Fox, I kept my secretary over at MGM, where I’d just finished The Prize, and then I’d send her the pages to type up.”
The Sound of Music Page 4