Quote of the day:

Middle age is when you go to bed at night and hope you feel better in the morning. Old age is when you go to bed at night and hope you wake up in the morning.
—Groucho Marx

Having used some excerpts from The Sound of Music in my little Sondheim video, I decided to re-watch the 2013 televised production the other evening.

Now I realize some folks will regard this as heresy, but of all the well-known Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, The Sound of Music is probably my least favorite. I find the plot rather weak and Hammerstein’s lyrics are not among his best.

Take the title song. The word “heart” is used six times. We find that the hills fill the singer’s heart, her heart wants to sing, it wants to beat, it wants to sigh, it gets lonely, and it will be blessed. Actually it does more than that because the word “heart” isn’t always repeated. It also wants to laugh like a brook and sing through the night. That heart is very busy indeed. 

That’s also the song that contains the line about a lark learning to pray. Interestingly enough, when I searched the internet for the lyrics I found a few sites where the larks were learning to prey, which I thought made a fascinating alternative image for a darker re-imagined revival of the show.

As to the plot, Elsa never seems to be a very serious rival to Maria for Georg von Trapp’s affections and the Nazis seem rather toothless and too easily tricked.

Ernest Lehman wrote the screenplay for the motion picture adaptation and made some major revisions. For example, he moved “My Favorite Things” from a shared memory of Maria and the Mother Abbess to the scene where Maria calms the children during a thunderstorm, making it much more effective in the process.

And director Robert Wise knew a thing or two about directing musicals. Gerald Mast has called Wise’s 1965 film version “as good a musical film as there is between 1958 and 1972— the best film version of any Rodgers and Hammerstein show, as good as any film adaptation of a stage musical in the same fifteen years.” He complains that the earlier adaptations were merely photographed stage plays or “opera films” not “real movies”. (For the record, I have nothing against filmed stage plays.) But alone among the R&H films, Wise cut away from the faces of the singers,

freely intercutting images and telescoping space while characters sang. The Sound of Music is a film in which the action is not only set in the Alps and the characters live in the Alps; Wise makes the Alps live in the characters. Their lives are inseparable from the scenic surroundings— they ride bicycles in it, row boats in it, climb trails in it, eat lunch in it. The film draws powerful visual contrast between being indoors, in the cramped, dark confines of the abbey or the von Trapp mansion, and outdoors, where Maria hears, feels, sees the sound and light of nature’s music—and where she teaches others to hear, see, and sing them. The nature that inspires Maria’s songs also “sings” in the radiance of Wise’s images. The film’s score, theme, verbal imagery, and visual imagery are one—sound, space, and light. The light of that outdoor space inspires the sounds that Maria makes into music.

Is there anything more joyous than the images of Maria and the children romping around Salzburg while singing “Do Re Mi”?

But Lehman made some other changes as well. He turned Elsa and Max into non-singing characters, which necessitated the elimination of their songs. And I happen to like their two songs.

The first one in Act I is “How Will Love Survive?” Max observes that both Georg von Trapp and Elsa are rich. So, he teases Elsa, how can their love survive if they have no obstacles to overcome? As Georg is very much present while they are singing and he does not join in, it helps to point out that he does not sing. This is just before Maria gets the children to sing a song for him and Elsa, so the song serves a dramatic function.

The second song is in Act II and is called “No Way To Stop It”. It refers to the growing Nazi menace and it also serves a dramatic purpose.

Here’s a little video with both songs and I’ve included enough dialog for the second song to place it into context.

I sometimes think that the film of The Sound of Music functions something like the TV show Star Trek. What I mean is, Star Trek attracted lots of fans who had never read science fiction and they became fanatical about the show—and that fanaticism never translated into their exploring any other areas of science fiction. They are Trekkies first, last, and forevermore. Similarly, it seems to me that many fans of the film of The Sound of Music never bothered to explore other musicals, let alone the stage play that it was based on.

I think that explains why when Carrie Underwood played Maria in the televised The Sound of Music Live in 2013 she was met with tons of abuse from fans who sneered that she wasn’t Julie Andrews. Of course, she wasn’t, and the production wasn’t the movie version. But she was perfectly fine. As was the production.