THE VON TRAPPS ARE BACK WITH A NEW MUSICAL SOUNDThe hills are alive again with a new American generation of the singing family made famous by the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical

A divided staircase in the middle of an elegant entrance hall painted white. Crystal

chandeliers, parquet floors, gold brocade-upholstered furniture, views through spacious

windows of manicured lawns leading to a lake. And a baker’s half-dozen of children

continually popping up to harmonize.

That, of course, is Sound of Music world, first glimpsed in the 1965 film version of

Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway show, and by now embedded in the brains of

most inhabitants of the actual world. The house is the movie studio version of the von

Trapp villa near Salzburg, Austria, and the children are the movie studio version of the

von Trapp children.

Picture, by contrast, a mostly unfurnished four-bedroom town house in northeast

Portland, Oregon. The neighborhood is called Hollywood, which is ironic, because this

is real life. The bedrooms are occupied by the real grandchildren of one of the real von

Trapp children immortalized in the movie. That would be Kurt, “the incorrigible one,”

whose name was actually Werner. The house is unfurnished partly because the four

siblings—Sofia (known as Sofi), Melanie, Amanda and August, who range in age from

25 down to 19—haven’t lived there very long, but mostly because they use the house

to rest their heads at night and eat a bowl of cereal in the morning. They spend the rest

of their time doing a very Sound of Music-y thing. Singing.

They’ve been singing together since they were mere babes, and doing their public

“shtick,” as Sofi calls it, for about 13 years: most of their lives, that is.

The road to the town house in Hollywood started with a decision made years ago by

the von Trapp kids’ father, Stefan—son of Werner, grandson of Capt. von Trapp

(otherwise known as Christopher Plummer), step-grandson of Maria (Julie Andrews).

He had grown up in Vermont with a bunch of cousins, and ultimately decided the

atmosphere and the real and cinematic bloodlines were a bit oppressive. With his wife,

Annie, he moved far away—to Kalispell, Montana, where he learned stonemasonry

skills, opened a business, and had three girls and a boy. Werner would visit in the

summer—to the kids he was always “Opa,” German for “grandpa”—and teach them the

Austrian folk songs he had sung as a child. One summer he was too ill to make the trip,

and the kids recorded their first homemade CD so he could hear it back in Vermont.

In 2001, the New Age pianist George Winston heard the children sing at a festival in

Montana, and was impressed enough to have them open for him while he was touring

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the state. Gradually, they began to get gigs of their own. At the start, their set list

consisted of Austrian folk songs and Sound of Music selections. August, who joined his

sisters when he was 7, wearing lederhosen to their dirndls, was first soprano.

Stefan had done masonry work for television-series wildlife guru Jack Hanna , who has

a house in Montana, and through him became friendly with Wayne Newton, whom the

kids knew from the Chevy Chase movie Vegas Vacation. Newton gave them what

Amanda calls “amazing advice.”

 Thomas Lauderdale of the pop group Pink Martini (at home in Portland, Oregon), a fan

of the original von Trapp singers, nurtures the current generation. “When I met them,

they were at a crossroads,” he says. “It was perfect timing.” (Susan Seubert)The von Trapp family. (Susan Seubert)The von Trapps (with Pink Martini in Portland) see their vocal cohesion as a legacy. “Our grandparents were known for their familial blend,” says Sofi. “People tell us: You sound like one voice.” (Susan Seubert)The von Trapp family overlooking Portland, Oregon. (Susan Seubert)The von Trapp family overlooking Portland, Oregon. (Susan Seubert)After fleeing Austria, the von Trapps began concert tours (from left, daughters Maria, Martina, Hedwig, Agathe and Johanna in New York City, 1938). “The children were wonderful,” their stepmother, Baroness Maria von Trapp, recalled. “I loved them from the start.” (© Bettmann / CORBIS)

“It was right when August’s voice was changing,” Melanie says, “and so you asked him

—”

Sofi picks up the story: “Somehow, I asked him how he went through his voice change.

Obviously, he had such a high voice. And he said he just kept singing the high notes

and he was able to keep his falsetto.”

"It was good advice,” August says, “but man, it was hard. I never knew when my voice

would, like explode. It was like a time bomb.”

Touring the country, the siblings began to comprehend the magnitude of the Sound of Music story, and what it meant to people. “After the show, people would come up to us

and would be like, ‘I met your grandmother....I heard her sing in this hall 50 years ago,’”

Melanie says. “That’s when we started to kind of understand that we were carrying on

something.”

“We would hear people say, ‘I saw The Sound of Music when I was 6 years old, and it

made me realize what I was going to do with my life,’” Amanda says. “And then they

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would thank us for something we almost had nothing to do with. That weight of

importance always rested on us. We knew it wasn’t just about ourselves.”

But only recently have they hit the big time. In March, they released a new CD, Dream a Little Dream, and embarked on a 24-city tour, both projects collaborations with the

eclectic musical group Pink Martini. The CD features guest appearances by Wayne

Newton, Jack Hanna (also a musician), Paddy Moloney and the Chieftains. And, on

the Sound of Music songs “The Lonely Goatherd” and “Edelweiss” (not real Austrian

folk songs, as many think, but Rodgers and Hammerstein concoctions), Charmian

Carr, who played Liesl in the film.

It may seem odd, but it’s nonetheless true that the von Trapp family was famous

before The Sound of Music. The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical opened on

Broadway in 1959 and was based on a 1949 book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, by Maria von Trapp. This is the same Maria played by Mary Martin on stage

and Julie Andrews on screen, a postulant who was hired by Capt. Georg Ritter von

Trapp, a widower, as a tutor for one of his children (not a governess for all of them, as

in the musical), and ended up marrying him. (That part was true.) As early as 1935,

with the encouragement of and under the direction of an Austrian priest, Franz Wasner,

Maria and her stepchildren formed a vocal group that performed professionally at the

Salzburg Festival; in 1937 they went on a tour of Europe and even made a television

appearance on the BBC.

The following year, the Nazis annexed Austria. Because the von Trapps’ former home,

the city of Trieste, had become part of Italy, the family possessed Italian passports and

used them to get on a train out of the country, eventually settling in the United States.

(The musical’s exodus on foot over the mountains is another invention by the librettists,

Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse.) Within the year, accompanied by Father Wasner,

they made their first tour of the United States, capped off by a well-received concert in

New York’s Town Hall. The New York Times observed, “There was something

unusually lovable and appealing about the modest, serious singers of this little family

aggregation as they formed a close semicircle about their self-effacing director for their

initial offering, the handsome Mme. von Trapp in simple black, and the youthful sisters

garbed in black and white Austrian folk costumes enlivened with red ribbons. It was

only natural to expect work of exceeding refinement from them, and one was not

disappointed in this.”

The family lived for a time in Merion, Pennsylvania, and eventually settled in Vermont.

But from the beginning, the Singers—eventually including the three children of Maria

and the Captain—spent a good part of the year touring the country, offering audiences

in Iowa or New Mexico exotic and ultimately heartwarming sights and sounds. In a

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typical concert, the family opened with sacred selections, perhaps a Gregorian chant

and a Bach piece, then did an instrumental portion (recorders, spinet and viola da

gamba), followed by madrigals. After intermission, they changed into their trademark

Austrian outfits—dirndls for the girls, lederhosen for the boys—and did a set of Austrian

folk songs, a demonstration of crowd-pleasing yodels and finally a selection of

international folk songs.

Part of the appeal of the Trapp Family Singers—they judiciously dropped the “von”

after settling in the U.S.—was the contrast they offered to happenings in their native

country and neighboring Nazi Germany. The New York Times, reviewing their

“picturesque” 1940 holiday Town Hall concert, commented that they “afforded the large

audience a glimpse into an Austria, not of storm troopers, but of devout families who

sing and make music at home in the evenings.” Feature reporters found they made

good copy as well. One 1946 article reported, “In the hotel dining room, the Baroness

Maria von Trapp, a tall, strong blue-eyed woman in radiant health, dressed like her

daughters and like them, without make-up, firmly pressed our hand, and then

introduced us to the Baron, a twinkling-eyed man who looked like Santa Claus with a

mustache instead of a beard.”

The tour eventually expanded to as many as 125 performances a year, and according

to William Anderson, author of The World of the Trapp Family, became “the most

heavily booked attraction in concert history.” He doesn’t cite a source for that assertion,

but with their annual tour, RCA Victor recordings, occasional television appearances

and Maria’s best-selling memoir, there’s no doubt the von Trapps were a significant

cultural institution.

However, by the arrival of the new decade of the ’50s, some of the siblings were

marrying and having children and getting into professions like medicine and forestry,

making it necessary for non-family ringers to don the dirndls and lederhosen on stage.

There was also a sense, among some observers, that the act had worn a little thin. “No

matter what they were up to, the Trapps did their work in a tentative, unbending

manner—smiling nervously now and then—and the audience, to judge by the applause

that followed each number, was pleased by this show of diffidence,” wrote Douglas

Watt of the New Yorker, reviewing the 1951 Christmas concert. Watt wasn’t charmed.

“There was so much Gemütlichkeit in the air that it began to grow stuffy, and I left

before they got to the carols.”

The group finally disbanded after a farewell tour, featuring “In Stiller Nacht,” in the

beginning of 1956. By that time the Captain and one of his daughters had died. Some

of the siblings dispersed around the country and the world, but Maria continued to

operate a ski lodge in Stowe, Vermont, and many of her children and their families

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were nearby. (The lodge is still operated by her son Johannes and his family. Maria

died in 1987, and the last of her stepchildren, also named Maria, in 2014.)

A German film based on the family story was released in 1956, and eventually caught

the attention of musical comedy star Mary Martin. She decided it would be a perfect

vehicle—with Martin herself playing Maria, of course, and a score consisting of the

Trapp family repertoire. She brought on a producer, Leland Hayward, commissioned

the team of Lindsay and Crouse to write a script, and approached Richard Rodgers

and Oscar Hammerstein (with whom she’d had a spectacular success in South Pacific)

to come up with a single original song. Rodgers describes his reaction in his

autobiography, Musical Stages: “If they wanted to do a play using the actual music the

Trapps sang, fine, but why invite a clash of styles by simply adding one new song?

Why not a fresh score? When I suggested this to Leland and Mary they said they’d love

to have a new score, but only if Oscar and I wrote it.”

Write it they did. The show opened on Broadway in 1959 and was a smash hit, despite

some critical carping about its sentimentality. The London production the following year

was an even bigger success, and even bigger than that was the Julie Andrews film. It

won the Academy Award for Best Picture and grossed a whopping $126 million at the

box office.

The film has never really ended its run, of course, being presented in recent years in

karaoke-style sing-

alongs where audience members dress as characters and even song lyrics. (A brown

paper package wrapped up in string is a popular choice.) In December 2013, NBC

presented a live television version of the musical with Carrie Underwood as Maria.

Although the reviews were, as always, mixed, the production got fabulous ratings.

***

The consensus among the family Trapp was that the musical got the heart of the story

right, though there was and is some grumbling about that escape hike, the changing of

names (and sometimes gender) of some of the siblings, and, especially, the depiction

of the warm, Santa Claus-like Captain as a patrician meanie.

But none of that mattered. The film catapulted the family from renown to full-blown

celebrity, and there was nothing they could do about it. From time to time, the Trapp

Family Singers got out the dirndls and lederhosen and put on a reunion concert. But

there was no follow-up, as everyone by that time had demanding lives.

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It would not be until the 1970s that the music coursing through the von Trapp DNA

would again get expressed in a concerted manner. First came Werner’s daughter

Elisabeth von Trapp, who strapped a guitar on her back as a teenager, and ever since

has traveled the country as a folk singer.

Then came her Montana nieces and nephew. The touring and performing was fun for a

while, but about four years ago, with the sisters at college age, they decided, as Sofi

says, “to stop singing, and go to school, and kind of pursue our own dreams.” They

each enrolled in a different college, and August started attending high school in

Chicago. “It was our first time being with kids our own age,” Amanda says. (The

siblings were home-schooled.)Then, in 2010, they got a call from a producer from

“Oprah,” asking if they would appear on a special Sound of Music 45th anniversary

show. And how could they turn down a chance to sing “Edelweiss” with Julie Andrews,

Christopher Plummer and the rest of the surviving cast from the film?

After the show aired, there were offers from all around the world. Again, the touring

started. Again, it began to wear on them. One of the last concerts on their contract

came in December 2011: singing with the Oregon Symphony at Portland’s Christmas

tree-lighting ceremony.

***

“The symphony called up and said, ‘We’ve got the von Trapps,’” recalls Thomas

Lauderdale, the founder and leader of Pink Martini, who is a lifelong Portland resident.

“‘Can they be on stage with you?’ And it was, you know, I mean, I just sort of flipped

out, I was so excited.”

Lauderdale, who is 43, has spiked white-blond hair and usually wears a bow tie, had

grown up as a big fan of The Sound of Music. In fact, Pink Martini performed “The

Lonely Goatherd,” a yodeling showcase from the musical, at the second concert it ever

did. When he met the von Trapps, he found himself impressed by more than their

bloodlines and their pipes. “They were paying a different kind of attention than most

people are ever paying,” he said. “I think it has to do with them not having watched

television as kids. There’s a certain look in people who haven’t grown up watching TV.

There’s a different gaze.”

Lauderdale’s perception was on target. “No, we didn’t have a TV,” Melanie says. She’s

the second oldest, at 24, and, like her brother and sisters, personable, fresh-faced,

modest and nice. “Our dad didn’t grow up watching it, and neither of our parents were

into the whole TV thing. I mean, we watched ‘Bill Nye the Science Guy’ once in a

while.” Later, it emerges that none of the siblings has heard of Pee-wee Herman.

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Lauderdale thought their sound was terrific, too. “The way they sing comes from the

way they’ve grown up together, been in the same room together all these years,” he

says. “I don’t think that exists anywhere in the world, this combination of talent,

experience, family history and parents with the wisdom not to park them in front of

televisions. It was an amazing thing to behold.”

Then, in April 2012, Lauderdale asked them to join Pink Martini for a symphony show in

Indianapolis. It was there that the idea of making an album together began to develop.

“It was kind of the second time we’d really hung out with Thomas,” Amanda says, “and

he slid the sheet music for ‘Dream a Little Dream’ over across the table towards me.

He had no way of knowing it, but that song was my lullaby growing up.”

Lauderdale had the notion that August would strum the ukulele on the song, a Tin Pan

Alley standard from the early ’30s. The only trouble was, August had never played the

ukulele. “At first, it was really difficult,” he says. “But eventually you just keep at it, and

your fingers mold into getting used to it.”

“Dream a Little Dream,” with Amanda on lead vocal, Thomas on uke and Sofi on

melodica, is the title track of the disc. “In Stiller Nacht” is on it. The rest of the lineup

emerged by inspiration and serendipity. “I asked a lot of questions,” Lauderdale says.

“‘Who all do you like? Who do you listen to? Who would you love to work with?’ At the

top of the list was the Chieftains.” It turns out that Paddy Moloney’s venerable Irish

group once shared management with Pink Martini, and the siblings journeyed to Dublin

to collaborate with them on “Thunder,” one of three haunting New-Agey songs

composed by August on the CD. (“My hope in reality,” says the lyric, “comes flowing

from my dreams.”) There’s a cover of the Abba song “Fernando,” “Hushabye

Mountain,” from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and carefully curated songs from China,

Japan, Israel, France and Rwanda.

And how could there be a von Trapp album without including any songs from The Sound of Music? In fact, Dream a Little Dream has two, “The Lonely Goatherd” and

“Edelweiss,” and a guest vocalist on both is Charmian Carr, the original “sixteen going

on seventeen” Liesl. Not long after making the film, Carr moved from acting to a career

as a decorator, but she never stopped participating in Sound of Music events. At a

2000 singalong at the Hollywood Bowl, she met Lauderdale. While making Dream a Little Dream, he invited Carr to participate and she accepted without hesitation. Not

only did Carr feel the von Trapps’ sound was “exquisite,” she says from her home in

Encino, California, but she formed a quick and deep bond. “I told them they felt like my

own children,” she says.

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In Portland, Amanda von Trapp says that singing with Carr was one of the high points

of making the record. “Here are five people in the studio who would have no connection

otherwise,” she says. “It’s so distant, but so close. She represented this story that our

grandparents went through. And everybody loves this story, and her role especially,

being Liesl.”

The granddaughter of the brother of the person Carr played on screen pauses. “It was

a little surreal,” she adds.

BEHIND THE UNCEASING ALLURE OF THE RUBIK’S CUBEThe 80’s fad should’ve fallen into obscurity—somehow it didn’t

Erno Rubik was an interior design instructor in Budapest in 1974 when he decided that

the students in his “Form Studies” class—on the abstract properties of shape—might

benefit from a physical model. With rubber bands, paper clips and wooden blocks,

Rubik fashioned a fist-size cube from smaller cubes that could turn while still hewing to

the whole.

The cube was built to symbolize symmetry, but it threw Rubik a curve: It was also a

puzzle. Even a few twists made it difficult to return the small cubes to their starting

positions. It was “surprising and deeply emotional,” Rubik tells Smithsonian, with “an

inherent element of problem-solving that brought with it complexity, difficulty and

experiential value.”

Forty years after its birth, the Rubik’s Cube still beguiles. It inspired a $5 million exhibit

this year at New Jersey’s Liberty Science Center. And it received the ultimate Silicon

Valley salute: a turn as a “doodle” on Google’s home page. No less a figure of the

times than Edward Snowden, the NSA whistle-blower, told journalists they’d find him at

a Hong Kong hotel by looking for a dude with the cube.

The puzzle has insinuated itself so deeply into our culture that it’s easy to forget the

story of its improbable birth and near deaths.

Rubik wasn’t a marketing savant in 1974, but a shy 29-year-old living with his parents

in Communist Hungary. He tried to sell American toymakers on his doodad, but one

after another balked (too cerebral, they thought) until a vice president at Ideal Toy

Company in New York annoyed colleagues by twiddling one during a meeting. “It was

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making this clicking sound,” recalls former Ideal exec Stewart Sims. The company’s

president turned and said, “What are you doing?”

Ideal, which rode the teddy bear to riches, decided to take a chance on the cube—if its

inventor could prove it was solvable. Sims met Rubik in 1979 in the courtyard of a

Budapest hotel. “He solved it in two minutes,” Sims recalls. Some 150 million sold from

1980 to 1982.

Against all odds, a plastic cube with color stickers came to rival Pac-Man and Duran

Duran as an ’80s icon. It soon had its own TV show (ABC’s “Rubik, the Amazing

Cube”), orthopedic symptoms (Rubik’s wrist, cubist’s thumb) and art movement (Rubik

Cubism). Besotted mathematicians outdid one another formulating speed- solving

algorithms. The magic cube, the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter gushed

in Scientific American, was “a model and a metaphor for all that is profound and

beautiful in science.”

Like all crazes, this one soon faded. Cubers—teenagers, mostly—played on in the

shadows until a decade ago, when they found one another on the web and set up

speed-cubing tournaments, now held in more than 50 countries. (The world record for

fastest solve, set in 2013 by a Dutch teen: 5.55 seconds.)

Why does a middle-aged plastic puzzle with one right combination and 43 quintillion

wrong ones still seduce in our digital age? Because it “talks to human universals” while

remaining “languageless,” says Rubik. Mostly though, its appeal is “part of the mystery

of the Cube itself.”

THE BEAUTIFUL GAME BECOMES BEAUTIFUL ART AS L.A. MUSEUM PUTS SOCCER ON EXHIBIT

The work of artists from around the world looks at players, fans and the ball itself

Among the many things that baffle the rest of the world about the United States, our

failure to fully appreciate professional soccer—“football” or “fútbol” to most other

nations—must be near the top of the list. From Argentina to Spain, France to Kenya,

the sport is an international obsession, its teams the very embodiment of local, regional

and national pride. That fervor will reach its height this summer as 3 billion people turn

their attention to the World Cup, in which 32 national teams will vie to determine which

country wins bragging rights for the next four years.

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For Americans just tuning in to follow Team USA, a major exhibition at the Los Angeles

County Museum of Art may help us begin to understand the sport. “Fútbol: The

Beautiful Game,” on view through July 20, brings together the work of 30 artists from

around the world to explore soccer from the perspective of fans, players, critics and

even bemused bystanders.

“It’s a theme that speaks to so many people,” says curator Franklin Sirmans, whose

own love affair with soccer began during his childhood in New York, when he idolized

the legendary forward Pelé. For Sirmans, a highlight of the exhibition is Andy Warhol’s

1978 silkscreen portrait of the Brazilian superstar. “Warhol was looking at him not just

as a soccer player but as an international celebrity,” Sirmans notes.

Pelé may have popularized the moniker “The Beautiful Game,” but it stuck thanks to

athletes like Zinedine Zidane, a French player who is widely acknowledged as one of

the greatest the sport has ever known. Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s room-

sized video installation, Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, follows the midfielder through

the course of one 2006 match.

“Anything that is that athletic has an elegance,” Sirmans says. “To me, the Zidane

piece is about that individual artistry.”

Other footballers the show celebrates include Manchester United stars George Best,

Brian Kidd and Sir Bobby Charlton (who helped England win the World Cup in 1966),

each of whom L.A. artist Chris Beas depicts in acrylic paintings that resemble classical

portraits of heroes.

But soccer culture goes beyond the players on the field. Many of the works at LACMA

pay tribute to the sport’s rabid fans, including French artist Stephen Dean’s 2002-03

video Volta, an impressionistic look at a stadium full of Brazilian spectators, and Miguel

Calderón’s Mexico vs Brasil. The Mexican filmmaker spliced clips from years of games

between the two rivals to show the Mexicans winning goal after goal. (The eventual

score is 17-0—highly unlikely in a soccer match, especially since Brazil usually crushes

Mexico). In 2004, Calderón played the film in a São Paulo bar as a prank, letting

baffled customers think it was a real, live match.

Sirmans says his goal in assembling the LACMA show was to “think of soccer as a

metaphor for life, an approach partly inspired by the French writer Albert Camus, who

once said, “After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences,

what I know most surely about morality and obligations, I owe to football.”

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Camus might have believed that the simple rules of fair play in soccer had plenty to

teach us, but the game, like life, isn’t always fair. Wendy White’s 2013 Clavado and

Paul Pfeiffer’s 2008 video installation Caryatid (Red, Yellow, Blue) examine the “flop,”

the practice of flamboyantly faking injuries in order to win a penalty against the other

team. It’s a widely-ridiculed phenomenon that many fans find highly irritating—while

others see it as a valid strategy, since cheaters often win in life as well as in sports.

“Not everything is beautiful about the beautiful game,” acknowledges Sirmans. It can

inspire an unhealthy tribalism, and even violence among rival fans, he notes.

“Nationalism plays such a role, especially in the World Cup.”

English artist Leo Fitzmaurice’s bright, witty arrangement of discarded cigarette-pack

tops flattened into miniature soccer jerseys does provoke questions about obsession,

the artist’s included. Fitzmaurice doesn’t smoke or follow soccer, but ever since he first

spotted a jersey-shaped box top near a Liverpool stadium, he has collected more than

1,000, including brands from countries around the world. “It’s a slightly dirty habit,” he

laughs, “but it’s taken on its own life.”

Sirmans says that despite the issues connected with soccer obsession, he remains a

“big time” fan. This summer, in addition to the American team, he will be following the

fates of Ghana, the Netherlands and Brazil. Sirmans believes more Americans are

developing a taste for soccer—which may be why turnout for the exhibition has been

so impressive, he adds. “I see little kids coming in with jerseys on, which to me is the

greatest thing.”

While they’re at the museum, these young soccer fans may develop a taste for art as

well, Sirmans hopes. And perhaps the art enthusiasts who stop by the show will come

in turn to appreciate the artistry and pathos of the beautiful game.

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