Maria von Trapp in Stowe: the real woman behind “The Sound of Music”
Photo: C.M. Stieglitz, World Telegram staff photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Maria Augusta Kutschera was born in 1905 in Austria and was orphaned young. She was a novice at Nonnberg Abbey in Salzburg when she was sent to tutor one of the children of Georg von Trapp, a widowed naval officer. They married in 1927 and had three children, adding to his seven.
The family’s singing, encouraged by a priest, Franz Wasner, won a prize at the Salzburg Festival in 1936. In 1938, after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, the family left. They did not hike over the mountains to Switzerland as in the film; they took a train to Italy and eventually came to the United States to tour as the Trapp Family Singers.
Coming to Stowe
In 1942 the family bought a farm in Stowe. Georg died in 1947. Maria ran the household, the touring business and, increasingly, the lodge the family opened to guests. She wrote a memoir, “The Story of the Trapp Family Singers,” published in 1949, which became the basis for German films and then the 1959 Broadway musical and the 1965 film.
She received little money from the musical, having sold the rights early, and she was reportedly unhappy with how Georg was portrayed as cold and stern.
Later years
Maria stayed in Stowe for the rest of her life, also doing missionary work in the South Pacific. She died in 1987 at age 82 and is buried in the family cemetery at the Trapp Family Lodge.
Her descendants still run the lodge, and many of the visitors who come to Stowe know her mostly through Julie Andrews. The family has spent decades gently correcting the record.
