What Happened To The Von Trapp Family After The Sound Of Music?
"The Sound of Music" is one of the most beloved movie musicals of all time, and it's such an engaging tale that it's pretty easy to forget it's based on a real family. But what happened to the real-life von Trapp family, who also left Austria before the Nazis fully invaded the country during World War II?
The family's on-screen patriarch, Georg von Trapp (played by Christopher Plummer), was a military man in real life as well, which gave his family high status. That said, the real von Trapps, including Georg's wife Maria (played on-screen by Julie Andrews) and their children, left Austria in 1938 as Adolf Hitler and his forces began to annex the country. Luckily for them, Georg was born in Zadar — now a major city in Croatia but a territory of Italy at the time — so the entire family were citizens of the nearby European country and could go there. They then ventured to London and finally across the ocean to the United States.
Since "The Sound of Music" only covers the family's dramatic escape from Austria — across a series of mountaintops in the film, no less — let's get into what happened after that: their lives in the U.S. and time spent performing as the Trapp Family Singers.
The Von Trapp family performed for years in America
As it turns out, the von Trapps lived a very comfortable life in the United States eventually, though they arrived without much money to their famous name. After settling in America in 1939, they took advantage of their considerable talent and performed across the country as the Trapp Family Singers. Despite a brief interval when their American visas expired and they had to head to Scandinavia to tour, the von Trapps soon returned to America for good, buying a home in Stowe, Vermont.
The family led a music camp on their estate, and Maria and the von Trapp children went on to become American citizens (though records indicate Georg never became a citizen himself). After quite a lengthy career as the Trapp Family Singers, they collectively decided to stop touring in 1955 — in part because many of the children had left the group. Georg died in 1947, but Maria lived 40 more years. Their biggest legacy beyond "The Sound of Music" may be that the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe is still operating as of this writing.
How The Sound of Music changed the von Trapp story
Georg's good friend Max Detweiler, played in the film by Richard Haydn, didn't exist. Though he manages the Trapp Family Singers on-screen, that duty was performed by the family's priest, Reverend Franz Wasner. Maria wasn't brought to the von Trapp family home to serve as governess for all of the children but for just one of Georg's daughters who had scarlet fever.
There are also Georg and Maria's personalities, which were highly dramatized for the film. Georg was not as stern as he appears to be in the film and was instead a warm, caring father right from the start, while Maria had a nasty temper at times. Finally, that dramatic escape to Switzerland in the movie never happened and their travels weren't as dramatic as the film implied.
According to the National Archives, one of the von Trapp's children, Maria, discussed the family's escape in a 2003 interview with Opera News, saying, "We did tell people that we were going to America to sing. And we did not climb over mountains with all our heavy suitcases and instruments. We left by train, pretending nothing." For some time, the von Trapp's great-grandchildren performed together too. In 2010, the great-grandchildren of Maria von Trapp performed "Edelweiss" live on "Oprah." However, the great-grandchildren stopped performing together in 2017, as confirmed by their Facebook page.
Still, this doesn't change the fact that the von Trapp story is amazing — as is "The Sound of Music," which is streaming on Disney+.