Beautiful Music

A famous singing family now delights customers at their ski lodge in Stowe, Vt. Just don't expect it to be a reprise of The Sound of Music.

Story by Benjamin Pomerance
Slideshow music performed by GSNC Chorus

Maria von Trapp is alive and well and living in Vermont. No, not the Maria von Trapp, history’s most famous singing governess, the woman millions of moviegoers link with Julie Andrews and a certain musical called The Sound of Music. This Maria comes first.

First in this story, anyway. She was part of the von Trapp household before the other Maria ever crossed the threshold of their Austrian villa. Then this Maria became ill. Then came a new teacher and a stepmother and a singing group and the Nazis and a trip across the Atlantic and a chain of events that led this Maria von Trapp to where she is today, 95 years old and spending her days — quite contentedly, it seems — on the grounds of her family’s ski lodge in Stowe. And that’s leaving out the years she spent teaching school in New Guinea.

Wait. Let’s start at the beginning. As The Sound Of Music tells us, it’s a very good place to start. The only place to start with a story like this one.

The beginning comes with a case of scarlet fever. The year is 1926. An Austrian girl, ready to start first grade gymnasium — the equivalent of junior high in the United States — suddenly becomes too sickly to walk the three miles to school each day. She insists she can still make the trip. Her father, Georg, a noted submarine commander, refuses to let her. Four years earlier, his wife, Agathe Whitehead, had died from scarlet fever, leaving behind Maria and her six siblings. Now, with any illness, this disease in particular, Georg is unwilling to take any chances. So he puts out a request for a governess, a teacher for young Maria. At Nonnberg Abby in Salzburg, an aspiring nun named Maria Augusta Kutschera is selected to answer Captain von Trapp’s call. Within a year, she will become the newer Maria von Trapp, Georg’s second wife.    

"We sang them very beautifully. And I can say that because it is true."

Classes with her new governess, Maria recalls today, were anything but conventional. “We didn’t really have school,” she explains. “We would go up to the mountains and learn our lessons on the way.” What the governess didn’t have to teach Maria — or any other member of the family — was music. “We were singing all the time already,” Maria remembers. “Of course, we were singing Austrian folk songs. Nothing grandiose. But when Maria came into our home, she found out quickly how musical we were. And the programs became much more sophisticated. She taught us to sing madrigals.” She tilts her head to one side and laughs, the eyes that still see with 20/20 vision sparkling. “We sang them very beautifully. And I can say that because it is true.”

What isn’t true, according to Maria, is the popular conception of her father’s personality. Too much emphasis was placed on her father’s sternness in The Sound of Music, she says, making it appear as if Georg von Trapp was the tyrant of his household. Maria remembers her father as a much more benevolent figure, a man who enjoyed teaching his offspring the craft of woodworking and playing his violin for family sing-alongs. “My father loved children,” she states. And while he did carry a bosun’s pipe to call the family together, Maria says the movie images of the von Trapps marching down the stairs and assembling into line, standing at attention like child soldiers, is grossly exaggerated. “We had such a large house and gardens, he needed the whistle to call us,” Maria explains. “We might not have heard his voice if we were out in the gardens playing.”

Maria still owns one of her father’s whistles, and she still possesses the lung capacity to play it. Her eyes glittering, she blasts a call of one low note, followed by a high note, and then a trill. “That was Werner,” she says of the tones that used to summon one of her younger brothers. She blows another — one low note, one high. “That was Rupert.” Another brother. A third time, the whistle pierces her small living room. One low note, then three higher tones. “That,” she smiles, not appearing to be the least bit out of breath, “was for me.”

When you’re a von Trapp, even in 2010, you live with The Sound of Music, both its blessings and its curses. On one hand, as Maria acknowledges, it’s a nice story, perhaps even a beautiful one. On the other hand, certain aspects are not entirely true, glamorized for Hollywood. Johannes von Trapp has dealt with these inconsistencies all his life. As the family’s youngest child, Johannes has lived the real von Trapp story, the twilight zone existence of being recognized by many people and yet truly known by few. Now, as president of Trapp Family Lodge, the family’s world-renowned ski lodge set in the midst of some of Vermont’s most picturesque territory, he still fields plenty of “Did you really…” questions. Patiently, he answers them all, even while probably grimacing inside.   

"The Lodge is meant to be a reflection of our family, not a reflection of the film."

“The Lodge is us,” Johannes says, “and the movie is the movie.” He’s not a film star, and never pretended to be. Really, Johannes is a forester, with a master’s degree from Yale and a background that includes work on ranches in British Columbia and Montana. To him, the buildings and grounds of Trapp Lodge are home, the first home he ever knew. Today, as a popular resort, the place retains that sense of comfort, a welcoming atmosphere mixed with classic European elegance. Johannes says the von Trapps — the real ones — wouldn’t have it any other way. “The Lodge is meant to be a reflection of our family,” he explains firmly, “not a reflection of the film.”

Yet the distinction is difficult to make. Meet somebody named von Trapp, and you unconsciously yearn to ask about hiding in a convent while escaping Nazi-occupied Austria. “Isn’t that a nice story?” Maria says of the film’s climactic scene. “But it is not true. We didn’t hide. We got on the train and left.”

Worse still is the desire to ask about siblings with names and personalities that were completely altered for The Sound of Music. Children named Liesl, Frederich, Louisa, Kurt, Brigitta, Marta, and Gretl are strangers to the von Trapps. In actuality, Agathe, Rupert, Werner, Hedwig, Johanna, and Martina were Maria’s brothers and sisters through Georg’s first marriage; Rosmarie, Eleonore, and Johannes were born after Georg wed his second wife. “They are very interesting movie characters,” Maria says of the Sound of Music children. “But it has nothing to do with me.” 

At times, though, the changes in The Sound of Music bring humor, not annoyance, to the family. Maria can barely speak through her own laughter as she describes the truth about one of the movie’s most humorous scenes: The children, looking to indoctrinate their new governess into the household, strategically place a bullfrog on her dinner chair. “It was the other way around,” she insists. “She (the governess Maria) taught us to play tricks on others.” Not long after arriving at the von Trapp home, the governess hid a live chicken in Rupert’s night table. Rupert was stunned — and the game was on. “We were not the kind of people to do that,” Maria says, still laughing heartily. “But when Maria came, she taught us to do tricks. She always had to have excitement in her life.”

"If we hadn’t made that move, (Hitler) would have killed us without even thinking what he was killing."

Then there are the parts of the movie that are true. Some of them contain memories Maria would just as soon forget. Like the Nazis. When Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, the family — by then, Maria had been married to Georg for 11 years — was destined for trouble. Georg openly rejected Nazi orders. As correctly depicted in the movie, he refused to display the red flag with the swastika outside his family home. He also turned down a command post in the German navy and a request for the family to sing at Hitler’s birthday party. By this point, the von Trapps had become well-known throughout Austria for their musical talents. Maria believes their first public performance took place in Vienna, an impromptu concert when the family was asked to sing together and ended up delivering a two-hour recital. “We had so many songs ready, we could sing for a long time,” she recalls. “Then, everybody found out that we were ripe for the stage. And that developed into our first concert tour.”

Yet there would be no concert for Hitler. Such a refusal meant grave danger for the family. So the von Trapps left their home, traveling to a location in western Austria, today part of Italy. There, they took a vote that would change their lives.

The von Trapps had received an offer to sing in America. Father Franz Wasner, their musical conductor (loosely portrayed through the character of Uncle Max in the movie), thought they should go at once. Yet Georg refused to uproot his family without their consent. “My father asked each one of us,” Maria remembers. “He said that we had been offered a chance to sing in America. But if even just one of us did not want to go, we would not go.” She pauses. “So he asked each one of us, and everybody wanted to go to America.” She stops again. “Thank God. If we had stayed, Hitler would have eaten us. If we hadn’t made that move, he would have killed us without even thinking what he was killing.”

By September of 1938, the entire family was aboard a ship bound for New York City. One von Trapp member, though, does not remember the voyage, nor the concert tour of Pennsylvania that followed their landing on American soil. Georg and Maria were expecting a child, a girl. They planned to name her Barbara. Finally, in January of 1939 while the family was staying in Philadelphia, the baby came. Except the child wasn’t a girl. They named the boy, born and baptized into the Trapp Family Singers’ touring life, Johannes. Before long, he’d be joining his siblings on stage, a young soprano with the family choristers. Later, when his voice changed, they’d switch him to bass. Today, at the Lodge, he does not sing at all.

The concert tours, Maria recalls, were grueling. The von Trapps canvassed the country, singing to standing room-only crowds in every state. Most of the time, they traveled by bus. “An old, stinking bus,” Maria says. “It was an awful thing. The buses got better for us later on. We were thankful for that.” Yet even buses that smelled and too many hours on the road failed to deter the mezzo-soprano’s passion for music. “I loved to sing,” she says. “I belonged to it. I had no choice, really. It was what we were doing. But I always said even if they had stopped, I would have gone on singing. But of course, I wasn’t enough by myself.”

In 1942, the singing family came to Stowe for the first time. Having stayed with friends in Merion, Pennsylvania, for a couple of years, they spent the summer in the picturesque Vermont town, searching for a house they could buy. The hunt was fruitless…until the final week. “On the last Sunday we were going to be in Stowe, somebody came and told us that somebody was selling this farm up on the hill,” Maria says. “Rupert said we should at least go up and look. We came up over the hill — and we bought the view.” Tourists from around the world have been buying the view ever since. This site, perched atop Luce Hill and surrounded by three valleys, is where Trapp Family Lodge stands today.

Before the guests came, though, the place was the von Trapp family’s home. “Cor Unum” — Latin for “One Heart,” as Maria, the family matriarch, christened it — came with its share of challenges. The greatest obstacle was finding space to shelter everyone in the tiny farmhouse. “We had double-bunks in every room,” Maria remembers. In the winter of 1943, part of the house collapsed during a blizzard, providing the perfect excuse to build some new rooms onto the wooden dwelling. When not working on the house, Georg found a new hobby: tapping the trees on his new property to make authentic maple syrup. Decades later, the Lodge still maintains a “sugar house”, making syrup and maple candies through the basic methods Georg used.

Soon, the von Trapps fell into a regular schedule: autumns and winters on tour, summers in Stowe on the farm. In 1944, Maria and Georg leased an abandoned military camp at the foot of their hill and turned it into a summer music camp, a place where music lovers could congregate and perform as an ensemble. Georg played violin at the camp gatherings. Father Wasner conducted the choir. Maria’s brother Werner played the clarinet. Maria’s task was to give lessons on the recorder to campers. On the side, she gleefully engaged in a slightly different pursuit. “At the end of every sing-week, we made a big fire at the bottom of the hill,” Maria says. “I had a bet with a nun who was at the camp. I said that if I won the bet, she would have to smoke a cigarette with me by the fire. And of course, I won the bet, and she had to smoke a cigarette with me by the fire.” What was the bet? “That doesn’t matter now,” she quips. “The winning was what mattered.”

For a few years, the hills around “Cor Unum” were, to invoke the movie’s catchphrase, alive with the sound of music. Then, in 1947, Georg died. Three years later, the von Trapps traded in their farming career and entered the hospitality business. This is the part of the story Johannes starts to remember. “Our family was away a good part of the winter,” he explains, “and the ski industry was developing. So after my father passed away, my family decided that this was a reasonable thing to do.”

Opening a ski lodge, Johannes continues, was his mother’s plan. And today, Sam von Trapp, Johannes’s son and current vice-president of the Lodge, still views the place through his grandmother’s eyes. “She was constantly training us every day,” Sam says. “She had a very strong sense of right and wrong, and felt a strong sense of responsibility for the land and our people. She thought of herself as a mother to all of our teams here. And we try to carry on now as she would have wanted it.”

In 1950, Trapp Family Lodge officially opened its doors for visitors.  Five or six years later, Johannes remembers, the family made their last concert tour. Operating the Lodge became his mother’s full-time gig. Sam recalls that the work came naturally to Maria. Often, he says, she would stroll through the dining room at breakfast and dinner, mingling with the guests, just as Sam does today. “Even as the Lodge grew,” he remembers, “she wanted to keep that sense of family, of every guest being part of our family while they were here, intact.”  

The Trapp Family Lodge grew rapidly. Not because of the fame heaped upon the family by Rogers and Hammerstein, Johannes says, but simply because the clientele liked what the place had to offer. “There are a number of factors why people come and come back,” he states. “The movie has something to do with it. But I think the number of people who come just because they saw the movie is a fairly small percentage.” Whatever the reasons, business on Luce Hill expanded — transforming the Lodge, Johannes says, from “a mom-and-pop operation into a resort with 250 employees.” He even fell in love with one of those employees, a singing waitress named Lynne Peterson. In 1969, the year Johannes graduated from Yale, they were married.

When his mother died in 1987, Johannes says, Trapp Family Lodge had bloomed into one of the nation’s most celebrated ski destinations. Yet behind the rosy family portrait loomed an atmosphere of dissension. Today, Johannes is terse when discussing this period. He had returned to the Lodge after graduating from Yale to help organize the inn’s finances and, before long, decided he never could fully leave. “I’m the only one in the family that had any business sense,” he states as the reason he is president of Trapp Lodge. Quietly, he chuckles. “And sometimes, I’m not sure how much I have.”

At the zenith of the turmoil, 33 members of the von Trapp family owned stock in the Lodge. Finally, in 1994, Johannes bought out the other family shareholders. “The stock had been too widely distributed,” he says. “There were just too many different opinions about how to run things here.”  

Maria, however, missed most of the family fussing. Not long after her father passed away, she had accepted a position as a lay missionary in Papua, New Guinea. Here, she taught school — every class, she says, up through fifth grade — and experienced life in a culture at least somewhat removed from the von Trapp legacy. Her stepmother came to visit, even concocting the idea of establishing a lay mission at Trapp Lodge for New Guinea citizens. “Of course,” Maria laughs, “that never happened.” For a short time, Johannes worked with her, ultimately returning to the States to go to college. The rest of the time, Maria says, she was there alone. Yet never lonely. Today, she still warmly describes New Guinea as “my second home.”

She returned stateside in the late-1980s, buying a house near Werner in Waitsfield, Vt. Yet something was wrong. Strangely enough, New Guinea felt more comfortable than Waitsfield did. “Waitsfield was never home to me,” Maria says. “This” — she gestures at the walls of her chalet-style house on the Trapp Lodge property, the place where she’s lived since 1994 — “is home to me now.”

From her living room window, Maria can see the lands that once were her family’s farm, close enough to the Lodge to have regular visits from Sam but not so close as to become immersed in its operations anymore. That torch is being passed to Sam now, Johannes’s heir apparent at the family business. After graduating college, Sam spent six years “sowing his oats” around the world — as a ski instructor in Aspen and in Chile, as a model for Ralph Lauren, as a member of People magazine’s 2001 list of “America’s Top 50 Bachelors.” Ultimately, though, he says his Vermont home called him back.
“It all fit,” Sam says. “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be at the Lodge. I always looked up to my dad; to me, he was a larger-than-life character in many ways. So it was only natural for me to come in and continue doing what he does.”

Which is why father and son are still looking to improve an already-beloved product. Trapp Family Lodge encompasses around 3,000 acres now, with 65 kilometers of groomed cross-country ski trails. One new project, a microbrewery so the Lodge can brew their own lager, recently opened for business, and other endeavors, Sam hints, are on the way. “I’m always seeing something we can do,” Sam says. “And when I don’t see it, somebody else always has the fresh eyes to help me see it.”    

Equally important, though, is a sense of heritage. Sometimes, that means spending a weekend in the barn, tending to the newborn calves. On this particular afternoon, the family bovines are Maria’s chief concern. Carrying on the dairy farming goals that the von Trapps originally had in mind for the property, Sam and his wife, Elisa, still care for a small herd of cattle. One of the calves had almost died that morning, greatly worrying Maria. “Make sure to tell me how that calf is doing,” she tells Sam, right after her nephew gives her a kiss on the cheek. “I hope it will be all right.”

"I think the Lodge is doing what she wanted it to do."

And then, there is the other Maria, the one at the heart of The Sound of Music and, even today, at the heart of Trapp Family Lodge. The woman Georg hired as a governess in 1926 is still governing today, an unmistakable presence over the family business. “I think she’d be pleased,” Sam says. He laughs. “I know she wouldn’t like us serving alcohol. Dad had to fight her tooth and nail to serve alcohol in the restaurant.” Then he pauses. “But I think the Lodge is doing what she wanted it to do. She saw that a relationship with family and friends and nature is a good thing, a way to keep people happy. And I feel we are doing that.”        

The hills around Trapp Lodge may be alive with the sound of a new music now, the symphony of the next generation. Yet it’s really just variations on a theme. At the core of one family’s famous home, you can’t help hearing that the original refrain — the beautiful music that began decades ago with the story of two Marias, the harmony that started it all — still thrives. 

Have you ever visited Trapp Family Lodge?

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