Posted on 11/19/2017 4:15:47 PM PST by Twotone
The film of Rodgers & Hammerstein's The Sound of Music opened in March 1965, and was a smash. Its soundtrack album was just as phenomenal, and in Britain that year it quickly toppled Bob Dylan to become the country's Number One album. And it stayed Number One, on and off, for almost three years. The Rolling Stones and the Monkees and Val Doonican Rocks, But Gently would come along and hit the top for a week or two, and then Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer would effortlessly re-assert their dominance for another couple of months. Rodgers & Hammerstein were particularly good at seeing off the Beatles: Virtually every Fab Four album was knocked off Number One by The Sound of Music - Help!, Rubber Soul, Revolver... And fifty years ago the tale of the Trapp Family Singers pulled off its greatest coup by supplanting Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band at the top of the UK album chart.
To mark that half-century, and as a tip of the hat to Ridley Scott's decision to replace Kevin Spacey in All the Money in the World with my indestructible compatriot Christopher Plummer, here is the story of the last song Oscar Hammerstein ever wrote. It's not strictly a Christmas song, although it has sort of become one, and Elisabeth von Trapp sings it beautifully on The Mark Steyn Christmas Show. But it is a song about love of homeland (and, indeed, loss of homeland) and therefore not inappropriate for this season of Thanksgiving:
One night in September 1959, Oscar Hammerstein II came home late for dinner to his house on 63rd Street in Manhattan. He'd been for a doctor's appointment, and been told he had a stomach ulcer.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
‘The Sound of Music’ was the very first movie I ever saw in a theater. I was 5 years old and my German Jewish Grandma took me to see it.
And we then had a LOT of conversations about that movie and all that it entailed, through the years.
Love, Love, LOVE that you posted this. THANKS! :)
Twotone: Thanks! I didn’t know any of this.
Thanks for the Edel Weiss ping. I knew that the song was written specifically for the play, but not the ‘rest of the story.’
My late father-in-law’s favorite song.
Grabbed the DVD a little while back...
Still a Great movie...
lots of commentary was a Plus!
The singer tells of how he finds an edelweiss, a small white flower that only grows at high elevations in Europe, while climbing a cliff. He gives it to his girl friend and she then proudly wears it on her Sunday dress. The flower winds up uniting the two lovers.
Edelweiss--band and chorus of the infantry regiment "Gross-Deutschland" directed by Friedrich Ahlers (1939)
Adolf Hitlers Lieblingsblume ist das Schichte Edelweiss (Adolf Hitler's favorite flower is the simple edelweiss)--Harry Steier (with Otto Dobrindt & His Orchestra), 1934
Has been killing it recently. Amazing.
Makes the falling out with CR even more curious.
Austria was never denazified. My parents were married in a church in Salzburg in 1946 (both American). Years later I took my bride to that same church. We received cold steely glares from the custodianess. My wife already knew she appeared Jewish to others.
The Trapp family left Austria in 1938. Our visit there showed us why. Once back in Germany we felt like we were among family.
LOTS of people know politics.
LOTS of people know culture.
Steyn is one of the very few people who know both consummately and can magically weave them together at Mach 5.
I love his story of playing it in the WH for the Austrian President and all the Americans stood up as if for the Austrian anthem, but the Austrians didn’t know it! Hilarious.
A should see “The Sound Of Music”.
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