Book review: The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria Augusta Trapp

The forty-first book I read in 2016 was The Story of the Trapp Family Singers by Maria Augusta Trapp.  Yes, that Maria, as in How Do You Solve a Problem Like.  This is the memoir she wrote which, as the cover page asserts, "inspired The Sound of Music."

Note that word: "inspired."  Yeah, you've got the nun-to-be, the widowed Navy Captain father, a house full of kids, and Hitler looming in the background, but the musical is heavily fictionalized.  First of all, there's not one of the movie kids that has a real name.  (Pre-Harry Potter, Hedwig wasn't going to fly in Hollywood.)  Baron von Trapp wasn't actually to blame for the children not having play clothes; there was an aristocratic woman running the household who felt it her duty to make sure the children behaved properly (e.g., didn't wear play clothes, didn't sit on the floor, didn't play outside).  The children knew how to sing; they just didn't know all the folk songs which Maria had learned in the Catholic Youth Organization.

The film's timeline is heavily compressed, as well.  In actuality, Maria and Georg didn't return from their honeymoon, incorporate the family singing group, and flee Austria in the space of about a week; they had been married ten years and had been performing for two before the Anschluss.  And they didn't have to hike over the Alps, though they did use the fiction of a mountain-climbing trip to Italy to leave Austria by train before the borders were closed.

Probably the biggest difference between the book and the musical can be grasped from the fact that the big wedding scene (where the nuns, thankfully, did not actually sing about the bride being a "clown" and a "problem" to be "solved") takes place on page 61 of a 312-page book.  Clearly, the real Maria didn't feel that her story ended with her marriage, or even with fleeing Nazis!  Transitioning to America , and to Americans, is the main piece of her story.  There's a charming scene with Maria on the ship crossing the Atlantic for the first time, learning English by approaching American passengers:

"Please, vat is fat?" pointing to my watch.
"A watch," a gentleman answered, looking very friendly.
"E Votsch," I wrote down seriously.  "and fat?"

There's a terrific pay-off to the story later on when the family is in America.  One of the passengers does his part to teach Maria popular slang, so when a nun at a Catholic college where the family is singing is nervous about the concert, Maria kindly advises her to "keep her shirt on," and when she is politely motioning a bishop to go first through a doorway they have both reached at the same time, she says, "Please, Bishop -- scram."

A side note: the movie's Baroness, in Maria's memoir, is the Princess Yvonne.  She comes off even worse in the book than in the movie, though one must keep in mind that the source was her romantic rival.  Captain von Trapp breaks the engagement upon receiving a letter from Maria and tells the princess that she put him off too long and should have agreed to marry him two years earlier when he first asked.  Maria lays a rumor that the Captain married her because she was pregnant at the princess's feet, a breathtaking act of pettiness, if true.

And yet ... according to Wikipedia, there is a question about the birthdate of Maria and Georg's first child.  When answering questions upon immigrating to America, Maria gave her wedding date as November 1927 and Rosmarie's birthdate as February 1928!  It's always possible that between the language barrier and the stress of travel and financial hardship that she misspoke, however.  The Trapp family insists Rosmarie was born in 1929, and the ship manifest from their first visit to America in 1939 lists the child as being ten years of age rather than eleven.  More to the point, existing wedding photographs provide no evidence that the bride was six months pregnant at the time.