The Von Trapp Family

Mon 29th Sep - 4:00PM

While The Sound Of Music has been an extremely successful money-making property, the von Trapps themselves profited little from the musical interpretation of their lives.

Biography

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The Von Trapp Family
birth place: Austria

The family suffered, but Maria made them sound harmonious and heroic in her book, The Trapp Family Singers, which she wrote as a way to help promote the group. To her surprise, the book was a success and it would eventually find its way into the hands of the reigning Broadway star of the 1950s, Mary Martin.

Martin and her producers started to work on the project that would become The Sound of Music - the musical that vaulted a family of Austrian immigrants to worldwide attention, and made Maria a celebrity.

While The Sound of Music has been an extremely successful money-making property, the von Trapps themselves profited little from the musical interpretation of their lives. Maria had sold the rights to her book for a flat fee - no royalties - long before Mary Martin had come into the picture.

Today, most of the surviving von Trapps live down-to-earth lives in rural Vermont. And, The Sound Of Music continues to captivate
audiences around the world.

On 12 March, 1998, the revival of the stageplay opened on Broadway, and every year some 500 to 600 high-schools perform their versions of the musical. But the von Trapps take pride not in The Sound Of Music, but in their own music - music that they performed together as a family for almost twenty years.

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