In August 1938, the musical von Trapp Family of Salzburg packed suitcases, walked out their back gate, crossed the lane to the railroad station, and caught the first train to Italy.
“NO, WAIT! You’ve got that all wrong, O New Favorite Writer. Everybody knows they slipped out of a performance, donned knapsacks, and hiked across the Alps to Switzerland.”
Au contraire, Gentle Reader. What Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, and their adorable kids did in The Sound of Music would have required a mountain trek of 200 miles or more. Absurd, when there were trains every day from Salzburg to Italy—a place where, incidentally, they were already citizens.
And oh, by the way: Captain Georg Ritter von Trapp’s second wife, Maria (think Julie Andrews), did not teach his children the elements of song (“Do—a deer, a female deer; Re—a drop of golden sun; Mi—a name I call myself . . .”). The whole family were already accomplished singers and instrumentalists when she came into the household as teacher to von Trapp’s third child, who had been sick.
And oh, by the way: The eldest Trapp child was not Liesl, but Rupert. And the next eldest Trapp child, the eldest daughter, was still not Liesl, but rather, Agathe. (None of them were Liesl, but it’s a nice, German-sounding name.)
Agathe von Trapp is the one who, still clear-minded and articulate at the age of ninety, published a 2003 memoir titled Memories Before and After The Sound of Music—a book Your New Favorite Writer has just finished reading.
The real story of the von Trapps lacks the surefire dramatic contours of The Sound of Music, but it’s compelling, charming, and inspiring in a different way. I found it a fascinating read, mainly because it’s a clear glimpse of a bygone world.
Agathe von Trapp was born into the Austro-Hungarian Empire—an entity that ceased to exist five years after her birth, when World War I ended. Her father had been an officer in the Austrian navy, which was no longer needed when Austria gave up its Dalmatian seacoast in the Treaty of Versailles.
Georg von Trapp lost his naval commission (demise of empire), most of his money (postwar financial crisis), and his wife, Agatha Whitehead (scarlet fever). When the new teacher, Maria Augusta Kutschera, came on the scene, the family needed a way to survive—and music became the answer.
The Trapp Family Singers sang themselves into Europe-wide demand in the few years before Hitler took over Austria. At that fateful moment, they had just received an invitation to undertake a coast-to-coast concert tour in the United States. Austria’s borders were about to be closed by the Nazis. Georg von Trapp was from Istria on the Balkan peninsula, a part of Austria which went to Italy in the postwar realignment, so the family had automatically become Italian citizens and received Italian passports. They just caught a train and got out of town.
Next season, they toured the United States and were warmly received everywhere. Coming to rest in Vermont, they built a resort hotel where music lovers could visit them in the summer, between touring seasons. After a few years, the children recognized they had to go their own separate ways, following individual dreams. But their family’s success during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s had come from pulling together, intelligently and with love, acting together as a unit.
It was a delightful read, informed by Agathe’s accurate memory and illustrated by her own line drawings of important places and scenes. Like all the von Trapps, Agathe was a person of many talents. Her story, really the story of her family’s navigation from the Hapsburg Empire to modern times, is inherently worth a read.
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A whole different thing is what we get from And There I Stood With My Piccolo—one of three memoirs penned by the late Meredith Willson, floutist, bandleader, composer, and storyteller extraordinaire.
If you don’t know Meredith Willson, he is the fellow who created every bit of The Music Man, one of the great musical shows in Broadway history. He followed up The Music Man with another pretty good musical called The Unsinkable Molly Brown. But everybody would say The Music Man is his chef-d’oeuvre.
Some time ago, I read his memoir But He Doesn’t Know the Territory, in which he told the story of how The Music Man came to be created and produced. It was truly entertaining, but it left me with the feeling that somehow this corn-fed Iowa musician magically appeared on Broadway one day with the perfect musical show about musicians in Iowa.
This book tells the rest of the story. It was originally published in 1948, nine years before The Music Man opened on Broadway. When Willson wrote this memoir he had not yet accomplished, nor even fairly begun, his life’s major work. But it shows that he did not come out of nowhere.
“New York talk was a heck of a shock to me,” he says. Maybe that’s because, having lived his whole adult life in New York and California, he still talked like an Iowa boy. Or at least, he wrote like one.
This memoir builds on a big contradiction: A man who couldn’t wait to get out of Mason City and conquer the musical world of New York writes most eloquently and passionately about the sounds, sights, and memories of his boyhood in Iowa. Despite having spent decades hobnobbing with the glitterati of the show-biz world, and despite his obvious pride at having become one of them, he achieved his life’s masterwork by bringing Mason City to a New York stage.
He was born in 1902—eleven years before Agathe von Trapp was born in Austria! He wound up chronicling that innocent period before the Great War which was known, even in America, by French names like fin-de-siècle or Belle Epoque. In Iowa the Belle Epoque looked like farm boys smoking corn silk behind the barn. In this work we get a fair amount of very particular boyhood reminiscence.
But we get something else: We get a flying tour of the period between about 1920 and 1950—roughly the same between-the-wars era that Agathe von Trapp describes in the European context.
Willson’s life in these decades reads like it’s lifted from the pages of Variety. He clearly delights in dropping names. His recollections, interspersed with homespun Iowa philosophy, are mostly anecdotes involving famous musicians and other entertainers with whom Willson had business and personal relationships.
To someone like Your New Favorite Writer, this book was a treasurehouse of innocent merriment. To you, Dear Reader, I would say it depends on your era and your historical interests.
Here is a sample of the people mentioned in this slim book, most of whom Willson knew personally: Eugene Ormandy, Paul Whiteman, Bing Crosby, John Philip Sousa, Victor Herbert, George Jessel, Chauncey DePew, Lee DeForest, Walter Damrosch, Arturo Toscanini, Nelson Eddy, Phil Harris, Ted Fio Rito, Horace Heidt, Anson Weeks, Kay Kyser, Carlton Morse, Bill Goodwin, Xavier Cugat, Ralph Edwards, Mel Blanc, Amos ’n’ Andy, Lum and Abner, Mortimer Snerd, Stoopnagle and Budd, Gene Autry, Ferde Grofé, Pinky Lee, Jerry Lester, Pierre Monteux, Herb Caen, Lanny Ross, Hattie McDaniel, Jack Haley, Warren Hull, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, Buddy Ebsen, Robert Montgomery, Norma Shearer, Ed Gardner, Darryl Zanuck, George Kaufman, Robert Taylor, Spencer Tracy, Charlie Chaplin, Sam Goldwyn, William Wyler, Frank Morgan, Fannie Brice, Robert Young, Fred Waring, Adolph Zukor, Frank Sinatra, Ken Carpenter, Harold Lloyd, Ray Noble, George Burns, and Gracie Allen.
My point is: If half or more of these names ring a bell for you, then you’ll probably enjoy this chatty little book as much as I did. If not, you may still enjoy it—but you’ve got a lot of Googling ahead of you.
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Why do I combine these two books, one by Agathe von Trapp and one by Meredith Willson, in the same post? For one thing, I read them back-to-back. For another thing: They are scintillating memoirs by two people living through the same period of history—one in Old School Europe, the other in brash young America.
Both of them shed light not only on their own lives and doings, but on the whole milieu in which they lived—the fleeting years between the First World War and the advent of television. They were interesting years, “lost” years in some ways. They were mostly before my time, but I happen to like reading about them.
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
