Updated August 17, 2024 at 06:14 AM ET
SALZBURG, Austria — Dhananjay Raval first saw The Sound of Music, as a young child. This summer, he traveled from his hometown of Ahmedabad in western India with his own adult son to fulfill a lifelong dream of visiting the breathtaking sites where the film was shot six decades ago in Salzburg.
"Time is going on, 60 years, but the story and song is forever," he said, standing in front of the gazebo where Liesl and Rolf sing "Sixteen Going on Seventeen" in the musical drama. "This story I show [to] my children and grandchildren so they... know what is the value of family."
This city at the foot of the Alps is gearing up for major celebrations next year, marking six decades since the theatrical release of the story of a rebellious would-be nun who charmed a stern naval captain and his seven children.
A music special will feature new arrangements of the songs performed by stars like Baby Face, Pentatonix and Thalía. Von Trapp family members and other celebrities will mingle at a gala dinner. There will be seminars, flash mobs and Leopoldskron Palace — depicted as the Von Trapp home in the film — plans a "captain's ball." In town, a maker of traditional dirndl dresses will stage an exhibit on the film’s costumes.
Nearly 3 million people from around the world visit each year this city of just 160,000 residents. The Salzburg Festival and sites related to Mozart, who was born here, also rival for attention, with the city pulling in around a billion euros (a similar amount in dollars) per year from tourism, according to local government statistics.
The 60th anniversary of The Sound of Music's theatrical release next year won't be song and dance for everyone. The special occasion could spell another peak in visitors for a city already grappling with overtourism.
The costs, and benefits, of overtourism
Raval is part of a Sound of Music pilgrimage of sorts that includes walking tours, bike tours and bus tours to visit sites like the Pegasus Fountain at Mirabell Gardens (site of the finale of the "Do-Re-Mi" song), Nonnberg Convent (where Julie Andrews' Maria was once a novice) and St. Gilgen, where Maria frolics through the hills in the opening scene. And palaces like Hellbrun and Leopoldskron evoke a bygone era. Panorama Tours, which once transported the film's stars and crew in 1964, now brings around 140,000 people to the sites each year.
But Sound of Music mania has not rubbed off on locals here. "We were not aware of the movie and of the impact it has to so many families until we actually were exposed to it and questioned by it through our tourists. And now it's become part of our DNA," said Christine Schoenhuber, CEO of Tourismus Salzburg GmbH CEO.
Visitors, she says, come from as far as Australia, South Korea, the Middle East, Mexico and of course the United States to take in the sights.
Salzburgers disconnected from the film
Despite the global appeal, many Salzburg locals haven't seen the film or feel little emotional connection to the story filled with uplifting plotlines and catchy Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes.
“I'm typical of the Salzburg people because I don't know anything about the film until I was an adult," said Peter Husty, chief curator and head of exhibitions at the Salzburg Museum.
For one, the venues are completely mixed up. What was made to seem one location, say the Von Trapp home, was in fact numerous ones.
Most views of the back of the home and the scene where Maria and the children fall out of a rowboat into the lake was filmed at the rococo Leopoldskron Palace. But the entrance was shot a couple miles away at a different palace, Frohnburg, built in the 17th century as the summer residence of Prince-Archbishop Max Gandolph. The actual Villa Trapp is in Aigen, on the outskirts of the city, and doesn't appear in the film. And all the interior scenes were actually shot on sets in Hollywood.
"The story was too romantic. It was tears cutting out of your eyes," Husty said. He notes that the real family managed to escape Austria thanks to their wealth and connections, while many others had no such choice during World War II. "And then all the other people in the film seemed to be Nazis. So a lot of small problems that were disgusting for the Salzburg people," Husty added.
Where are the Von Trapps now?
Husty has also been named chief curator of a new museum that Salzburg plans to open in 2026 dedicated to the film near the reconstructed gazebo where Liesl and Rolf and later Maria and the captain profess their love for each other. The structure is now located in the gardens of Hellbrunn Palace. A larger version was rebuilt in Hollywood for the interior shots.
"I want to tell on one side the success of the film where it is coming from, where is it going," said Peter Husty, who will serve as the new museum's curator. "And on the other side, I want to inform the visitors that the background of the Hollywood film is the story of a real family in Salzburg, and what have they really done and what was their life?”
Because before the film, there was the Broadway musical, the West German movie and the story of a real family first told by Maria von Trapp after she married Georg von Trapp. With so many iterations of the story, disentangling fact from fiction can be challenging. But one thing's for sure: the von Trapps' musical talents helped spare them the worst of the horrors of World War II.
Elisabeth von Trapp, the daughter of Werner von Trapp — depicted as "Kurt" in the film — plans to start next year her own walking tour that will focus on highlights of Salzburg, The Sound of Music and the von Trapp family.
"I think my relatives were very much about being creative and problem-solving... how to resonate together and harmonize. And when you do that not only musically but as a team building their new life — there's so many people that are being displaced around the world — it is a source of inspiration," she said.
Sitting at a café near the Mirabell Gardens after getting certified as a tour guide, she pondered her family's legacy.
"It just is, perchance, that my grandmother's story was chosen to come on Broadway," she said.
Of the initial Von Trapp children's generation, only Johannes, 85, still lives. He's one of three children born to Maria and Georg after their marriage, bringing the family total to 10 children.
Salzburg's cinematic beauty
Salzburg and its surroundings naturally lend themselves to cinematic grandeur, steeped as they are in tradition and alpine beauty.
Leopoldskron was commissioned as a family estate in the 18th century by the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, Leopold von Firmian, whose heart was buried in the chapel of the palace he "loved so dearly," so reads an inscription there.
The site is so well preserved, that "the view that we have here is basically the same that the archbishop had in 1736 when he built this Schloss," or palace, said Martin Weiss, president and CEO of the Salzburg Global Seminar based at Leopoldskron. "You have a really stunning beauty untouched for hundreds of years."
Across the lake, the Untersberg Mountains are shrouded in fog. Hollywood fiction has the family fleeing the Nazis there. But that itinerary would have landed them in Hitler’s mountain retreat, the infamous Eagle’s Nest. The real Von Trapps knew their geography and initially left Austria for a concert tour. From Italy, they found their way to Vermont, where their Austrian-inspired lodge remains a major tourist attraction in the town of Stowe.
Leopoldskron, from archbishop's passion project to center of creativity
SGS, which Weiss describes as a "platform that brings people together," has called the palace home since 1947. Its previous owner, Jewish theater producer Max Reinhardt inspired The Sound of Music's "Uncle Max." And the palace also served as the launching pad for the Salzburg Festival, which Reinhardt cofounded with writer Hugo von Hofmannsthal and composer Richard Strauss.
"It was really in this Schloss, in the Red Salon, where the three of them did their brainstorming and came up with this idea after this terrible devastation of World War One. Millions of people killed. Europe really at its knees," recalled Weiss, a Salzburg native and former Austrian ambassador to the U.S. "Their philosophy was, we have to bring people together. What language can we possibly use? Of course, the arts."
The Nazi government confiscated the palace in 1938 as “Jewish property.” Reinhardt was working in Hollywood at the time and never saw Leopoldskron again.
The Sound of Music, marionette version
Another art form also endures in Salzburg — marionettes. Anton Aicher founded the Marionette Theater here in 1913 and invented the "Salzburg cross" to manipulate the figurines, part of a technique that Austria's UNESCO commission has designated as an intangible cultural heritage. Everything is handmade, from the puppets to the costumes and sets.
The theater inspired the film’s “Lonely Goatherd” puppet scene, where Maria and the children put on a show for the captain, the baroness he had initially been due to marry and Uncle Max in the Venetian Ballroom.
Performances now include a Sound of Music-themed show, in both original and shortened versions, in a plush hall where cherubs fill frescoes decorating an ornate stucco ceiling.
"We can see it with all of our shows that from the child from three or four years on up to big, strong men, they are touched by the movement, the story and the ability, what is possible and shown on stage by the marionette," said general manager Susanne Tiefenbacher.
Backstage, around 600 hand-carved wooden puppets fill a room dubbed the "holy chamber." There are characters from productions of The Nutcracker, The Magic Flute, The Carnival of the Animals, Alice in Wonderland, The Tales of Hoffmann and of a new Romeo and Juliet production that will premiere at the theater's puppetry festival in October. Each show requires multiple versions of the same character, which means 30 to 90 puppets and nine to 11 puppeteers each time.
"The wood by itself is a dead piece of material. But through the art work and the empathic work of the puppeteers... with movements so delicate and so fine they move like human human beings, you will forget that it's puppets," said Tiefenbacher.
She pauses to reflect on why The Sound of Music still resonates, more than half a century since the film.
"There is the love, there is the family, collective singing and there is also the drama of the political background," she said. "And the political background, unfortunately, is coming up again. You can feel it worldwide and especially also in Europe that times are changing in a way, and to have to move your family from one place to another, forced by political circumstances."
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