The Sound of Music Companion: The official companion to the world's most beloved musical

by Laurence Maslon

  For one more lovely thing

  That the hills might say . . .

  The hills are alive

  With the sound of music,

  With songs they have sung

  For a thousand years.

  The hills fill my heart

  With the sound of music

  My heart wants to sing

  Every song it hears.

  My heart wants to beat

  Like the wings

  Of the birds that rise

  From the lake to the trees.

  My heart wants to sigh

  Like a chime that flies

  From a church on a breeze,

  To laugh like a brook

  When it trips and falls

  Over stones in its way,

  To sing through the night

  Like a lark who is learning to pray—

  I go to the hills

  When my heart is lonely,

  I know I will hear

  What I’ve heard before.

  My heart will be blessed

  With the sound of music

  And I’ll sing once more.

  Maurice Zuberano’s watercolor storyboards set up one of the most famous establishing shots in movie history.

  “When you sing, you pray twice.” This was a common saying among the von Trapp family, and whether or not Oscar Hammerstein knew of it, he certainly turned its philosophy into the essential core of this song.

  Although technically not the first number in the Broadway show (that would be the nuns’ “Preludium”), “The Sound of Music” is, to all intent and purposes, the defining song of the piece. It is also the title number, which carries with it a special responsibility; in all of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s shows, only three— Oklahoma!, Allegro, and The Sound of Music—have title numbers, and each song has a special significance to the story. Hammerstein was famous for saying that the first ten minutes of any musical-theater piece should define the style and the themes to follow. In “The Sound of Music” he sets up not only the style and theme but some essential plot points as well.

  To begin with, Hammerstein has Maria associate music with spirituality; her love of music and her faith are inseparable. In an early draft of the lyrics, he created a sense of yearning in Maria, eager to be fulfilled by something she has not yet experienced. Hammerstein also knew early on that this would be the song reprised by the children in the middle of the first act. And the word that appears most in the stage lyrics—“hills”— sets up Maria’s affinity for and knowledge of the hills surrounding Salzburg (something the real Maria did not have). This presages an important plot point at the climax of the show, when Maria must use her knowledge of the hills to lead her family out of Salzburg and into safety.

  In the Broadway version, Mary Martin as Maria is discovered in the branches of a tree. In Max Wilk’s Overture and Finale, Lauri Peters (the original Liesl) is quoted as saying, “When she appeared in that tree at the opening . . . she was reaching out to [the audience] and they immediately reached back. People got chills.” Early in rehearsals, Martin’s husband, co-producer Richard Halliday, had the idea that it might be cute if Martin got her bloomers caught in a tree branch on her way down. When approached with the idea, Rodgers and Hammerstein demurred—it did not seem to be the right moment in the show for underpants humor. Theater historian Ethan Mordden, in his survey of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s career, recounted that Halliday was furious with the rejection of his idea. “You know what your problem is,” Halliday supposedly shouted to the songwriting team, “all you guys care about is the show.”

  In the movie version, director Robert Wise and screenwriter Ernest Lehman cleverly began the movie smack dab in the middle of the song and created one of the most legendary openings in screen history. In order to start with a bang (or a swirl, at any rate), the introductory verse was cut, although some of its music is heard in Maria’s next solo, “I Have Confidence.” Wise used his editing sleight of hand to make it seem as if it is one long aerial zoom into Maria on top of the hill, when in fact, it is a very skillful cut. Getting the shot itself proved to be one of the most complicated efforts of the entire location shoot. The “hill” is a mountain called Mellweg, near a village in Bavaria, about eight miles from Salzburg. The opening was actually the last location shot in the picture and inclement weather kept Julie Andrews, Wise, and the crew at Mellweg for several days waiting for the clouds to break. Richard Zanuck, the Fox studio chief, was begging Wise to bring his crew back to Los Angeles in order to keep the production schedule on track, but Wise dug his heels in and waited it out. A gutsy move—where would the movie be without that shot?

  However, when the clouds broke, the difficulties were just beginning. According to Julie Andrews, interviewed for the fortieth anniversary DVD of The Sound of Music:

  You could say that that opening shot of my coming across the fields at the beginning of the film is really the quintessential postcard picture . . . but it was a very difficult shot to get. I would start at one end of the field and a huge helicopter with a very brave cameraman hanging out the side of it would start at the other end of the field and he would swoop down through the trees . . . and I would walk towards it, we’d get closer and closer to each other, then I would make that big turn just before singing, and that was the end of that particular shot. . . . The only thing is that the downdraft from the helicopter engine was so strong that every time he went around me to go back to the end of the field, he absolutely flattened me into the ground. . . . I finally tried to signal to the helicopter pilot could he please make a wider turn around me, and all I got was this thumbs-up and you know, “Doing great, just keep it up.”

  Someone in a tree: Mary Martin makes her first appearance—but not on a hill!

  Oscar Hammerstein’s early drafts show him searching for the right poetry to convey Maria’s yearning. The “summer music’ would give way to something less specific, but the chimes of the church and flight of the birds would remain in another form.

  Last-minute tinkering. For Hammerstein, every word counted and by changing the last line, he propelled Maria’s story forward.

  Some other bits of Hollywood trickery helped the opening number: both the mini-orchard of birch trees and the brook used for skipping stones were added by the production designer (a neighboring farmer took such umbrage at the crew’s presence that he damaged the basin for the brook with his pitchfork). Speaking of brooks, one last change from the stage version: in Hammerstein’s manuscript, one can clearly see that his brook “trips and falls / Over stones in its way,” not “on its way,” as is sung in the movie.

  Julie Andrews rehearsing that famous shot: gamely waiting for one more pass by that menacing helicopter, no doubt.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BROADWAY TO HOLLYWOOD

  Here’s the story of a lovely lady: More than a decade before her debut as a famous TV mom in The Brady Bunch, Florence Henderson was the accomplished leading musical actress who took The Sound of Music on tour.

  When a Broadway musical is successful, the producers waste little time in mounting a second production to tour the country. Rodgers and Hammerstein were expert at this sort of thing as well, founding their own production company in the mid-1940s in order to keep various tours, foreign productions, and replacement casts under their own control. The Sound of Music assembled its first national touring company in February 1961, while the show was still running on Broadway. Florence Henderson, who made her Broadway debut in 1953, was cast as Maria. Henderson, at the age of twenty-six, would be the first actress to play Maria at something close to Maria von Trapp’s actual age during the events of the musical.

  The touring company would eventually make its debut in Detroit, but a final runthrough was put together on the stage of the Lunt-Fontanne, on a Sunday when the show wasn’t performing, so that the Broadway cast could watch the show. Mary Martin watched the performance with her fellow company members, rapt with attention, but during the intermission, she was, acco
rding to Anna Crouse, “on her hands and knees, feeling around the floor. Russel said, ‘Mary, what’s the matter?’ and she said, ‘I didn’t know the show was this sad–and I cried out my contact lens!’ ”

  Of course, all Martin had to do was think of her favorite things—as well as her twenty-five percent investment in the production—and then she wouldn’t feel so bad, but the years immediately following the opening of The Sound of Music brought tears of joy, tears of frustration, tears of sorrow, and tears of exhaustion.

  How sweet it is! Mary Martin displays her fourth Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, next to Jackie Gleason, who won for Take Me Along. Sharing the honors on the dramatic side during the 1960 awards ceremony are Anne Bancroft (The Miracle Worker) and Melvyn Douglas (The Best Man).

  “IT IS CURIOUS THAT THE PLAY RUNNING IN NEW YORK THIS SEASON TO THE GREATEST NUMBER OF PEOPLE IS CONCERNED WITH A YOUNG CATHOLIC ABOUT TO BECOME A NUN AND HER FRIENDS. SOMEBODY DOWN HERE LIKES US.” RICHARD RODGERS

  Martin and Rodgers during the recording of the original cast album by Columbia Records: the eventual release would stay on the billboard charts for more than five years.

  First, the tears of frustration: the reviews. In New Haven and Boston, The Sound of Music had received enthusiastic reviews, with the noted exception of Elliot Norton. This stung, as Rodgers and Hammerstein had great respect for Norton. They also had respect for Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times and Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune. The two were the most powerful critics in New York and, although most of their colleagues had exuberant praise for the score and the Lindsay and Crouse libretto, Atkinson and Kerr were not moved by the proceedings at the Lunt-Fontanne. Kerr wrote: “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 . . . the pitch is too strong; the taste of vanilla overwhelms the solid chocolate; the people onstage have all melted before our hearts do.” Atkinson praised the craftsmanship of Rodgers and Hammerstein, but saved his whammy for the conclusion: “. . . the scenario of The Sound of Music has the hackneyed look of the musical theater [Rodgers and Hammerstein] replaced with Oklahoma! in 1943. . . It is disappointing to see the American musical stage succumbing to the clichés of operetta.”

  The term “operetta,” with a pejorative implication, is one that cynical critics have tried to tack on to The Sound of Music since its inception and, actually, it is a rather inaccurate one. Operetta was, indeed, conceived and refined in Vienna around the middle of the eighteenth century, but very few of its conceits exist in The Sound of Music. Operettas tend to focus on male/female romance; here the great romance, as Maria von Trapp said, is between Maria and the children. Operettas allow the lead characters to indulge in vocal pyrotechnics; here, the leading man has one subtle duet with the leading lady and one solo, accompanying himself on guitar. Operettas usually exist in exotic or romanticized settings, not a villa or a convent. And operettas usually conclude with a contrived happy ending; persecution and exile hardly count.

  Harsh, even vindictive, criticism would follow the show in its every incarnation over the next four-and-a-half decades. Some of it, to be fair, has to do with changing tastes in American culture. Rock ’n’ roll had made its permanent presence known in popular music by 1959. Musical shows such as West Side Story and Gypsy—both of which were created by, among others, Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, and Stephen Sondheim— showed Broadway audiences that there was room for more complicated and confrontational material in the modern musical. And a show that affirmed the values of family, faith, and freedom in America would be out of step with the unconventional drumbeat of the cultural revolution in the 1960s. The Sound of Music was one of the last important musicals to open in the 1950s, although both Fiorello! and Once Upon a Mattress, with a score by Rodgers’ daughter Mary, would open on Broadway in the weeks following. Could one not simply say that The Sound of Music was a smash at the box office and leave it at that?

  One could, but Rodgers and Hammerstein, who had done so much to revolutionize the American musical, were particularly nettled by any suggestions that their work was retrograde in any way. Rodgers, normally the more pugnacious of the duo, responded to these criticisms on July 10, 1960, seven months after the opening, in a New York Times piece celebrating Hammerstein’s sixty-fifth birthday:

  Most of us still feel that nature can have attractive manifestations, that children aren’t necessarily monsters and that deep affection between two people is nothing to be ashamed of . . . it is curious that the play running in New York this season to the greatest number of people and the largest amount of money, The Sound of Music, is concerned with a young Catholic about to become a nun and her friends. Somebody down here likes us.

  Oscar uncharacteristically let loose in a letter to a colleague who had accused the team of looking for something “sure-fire” to star Martin:

  Mary Martin found this property first and then invited us into it. We accepted the invitation because we liked the story very much. . . . We didn’t remember any other musical plays which dealt with the problems of a postulant who had made her mind to take the veil and then fall in love with a man. We thought it a very original situation that when her problem was put before the Mother Superior, that the Mother advised her to go back to the man. We, in our innocence, considered this a very original turn of plot and a situation of great human interest. . . . You see, the situation is even worse than you thought. Not only have we concocted this syrupy musical play, but we all love it and it has turned out to be a great success. That does not mean you should endorse it or like it. Nor are we obliged to agree with you that it is unadulterated treacle.

  Now, the tears of joy.

  At the 1960 Tony Awards, The Sound of Music was nominated for nine Tonys and won six. The nominees included Theodore Bikel and Kurt Kasznar (both for Best Featured Actor); Vincent Donehue, and, in a distinction unmatched before or since, Lauri Peters and all the other Trapp children were nominated jointly as Best Featured Actress in a show. (Patricia Neway was also nominated in that category as the Mother Abbess, and won the Tony.) The set designer, Oliver Smith, won a Tony, as did Frederic Dvonch as conductor and musical director. Mary Martin picked up the fourth Tony of her career (the others being for the tour of Annie Get Your Gun, Peter Pan, and South Pacific) and there was some tension over her competition in this category with her chum, Ethel Merman, who had been nominated for the performance of her lifetime in Gypsy. Merman took the loss with equanimity: “How are you going to buck a nun?,” she shrugged. The Sound of Music won the Tony for Best Musical, although, in another unprecedented vote, it tied with Fiorello!, a musical about New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, who served as a captain in World War I, just like Georg von Trapp. Even though Rodgers won a Tony for Best Score, there was no award in 1960 for Best Lyrics.

  A shame, because Hammerstein’s time was running out. By the Tony Awards, Hammerstein knew that his cancer had returned and that he was dying. In late summer 1960, he retired to his farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, and waited for the inevitable, surrounded by family and friends. Hammerstein died on August 23. He was mourned in every major newspaper across America and in London and by all of his friends and colleagues who knew that, over a forty-year career, he had changed the face of the American theater. On September 1, the City of New York paid an unprecedented tribute. All of Times Square—as opposed to the marquees of all the theaters, as was customary—would be blacked out for one minute at nine o’clock in the evening, just as the cast of The Sound of Music, still led by Mary Martin, would be getting close to singing “My Favorite Things.” But Rodgers and the other producers had asked for no special memorial or tribute that night. They posted a note to this effect backstage: “If you give a performance comparable with last Tuesday [the day of his death]—it will be the best possible memorial for Mr. Hammerstein.” In a tribute to Hammerstein’s influence, London’s theatrical circle paid the lyricist a similar honor five hours earlier by
dimming the lights of the West End.

  London had always admired Hammerstein, and he appreciated it enough to live there briefly in the 1930s. As early as 1926, he had enjoyed an unbelievably popular success with his book and lyrics to Rose-Marie at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. This began a string of hits for Hammerstein in the late 1920s as, one by one, his Broadway operettas conquered London, usually at the Drury Lane: The Desert Song, Show Boat, a revival of Rose-Marie, and The New Moon. When Oklahoma! opened at the Drury Lane in 1947, it began a second Hammerstein revolution with consecutive runs of Carousel, South Pacific and The King and I that lasted nine years. A London production of The Sound of Music was inevitable—sadly, Hammerstein was not around to witness the show’s immense success In the West End.

  Of the top twenty-five longest-running musicals to open in London before 1961, Oscar Hammerstein had written four of them; The Sound of Music would make number five, and its popularity in London would eclipse all of his other projects there. Unlike Broadway, it would contain no stars; the Maria, Jean Bayless, was largely known through her television work. After the production opened in May 1961 at the Palace Theatre, the critical reaction was far worse than that to the New York version. W. A. Darlington of the Daily Telegraph wrote, “Take the basic story of The King and I, scrape the oriental spicing and substitute Austrian sugar-icing an inch thick. Add a little bit of drama at the end.” Rodgers and Lindsay and Crouse thought they had been dealt a huge failure at the box office, but audiences felt otherwise. By the time it would close in London in 1967, The Sound of Music would rack up 2,386 performances, nearly 1,000 more than its Broadway counterpart. Perhaps its success was due to the fact that so many London families—much like the von Trapps— had suffered because of the Nazis, or that so many of the children who had been separated from their parents in the 1940s had now grown up and wanted to embrace a stage family that remained together despite the odds. Whatever the reasons, The Sound of Music was the longest-running American musical in West End history, until it was surpassed by Chicago five decades later.