The Sound of Music: A Chestertonian Tale

When I was young, movies were still watched on cassette tapes. For those of you who need your memory refreshed, they were large bulky devices that needed to be rewound for every viewing. Certain longer movies often could not fit on a single cassette, and came in a large box with two cassettes that had to be switched halfway through the feature. There were three such epics in my home growing up, and I dreaded watching each of them. One cassette was more than enough space for John Wayne to kill all the bad guys, and anything more didn’t keep my attention.

My poor mother, who lived in a home with three boys, was endlessly subjected to repeated viewings of John Wayne and Indiana Jones. But it seemed she made us equally as miserable when it came time for her to choose a movie at the family gathering. An ordinary normal-length movie that fit neatly on to one cassette would simply not do. She instead preferred those long features that a young boy like myself could categorize as a “love story” and then promptly dismiss. It was often extra tortious that the characters would often burst into song for no apparent reason.

One of those three films that sat in the corner was Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music, and like so much else that I hated in my childhood, it is something that I now can truly appreciate.

Last week a special television remake of the great classic was broadcast on television. After listening to the soundtrack, I decided not to watch it. To say that Carrie Underwood can replace Julie Andrews is to say that Justin Bieber can sing Ring of Fire. And if that is true there is no longer any moral justification for anything. In protest of this flagrant display of reductionism and relativism, I watched the original movie on the night of premier.

The film opens with the caption, “Salzburg, Austria. In the last golden days of the thirties.” It then does something very appropriate – it cuts to a scene in an abbey as the nuns are beginning to pray. The late thirties in Europe were hardly a golden time. There were wars and rumors of wars. Austria, an ancient and great Catholic kingdom, was under threat of being annexed by its northern neighbor, the cold and mechanical Germany.

This picture of the bright and singing Catholic country facing the cold hand of Prussia can’t help but make one think of the story as something Chestertonian, which is given credence by the fact that Chesterton himself wrote on the distinctions between old Austria and new Germany. In so far as Germany every had a historical culture or country, Chesterton explains, “it was never, through all the ages, what we now call Germany. It was what we now call Austria.” According to Chesterton, the great mistake of the Allies after WWI was to punish Austria. “Men like President Wilson were brought up in a rather priggish culture, which taught them, among other things, that kings are rather wicked; but that emperors are even more wicked than kings.” During WWI, Austria was ruled by the Emperor Charles I, the last of the Habsburgs and the last Emperor of Austria. Despite the sincere good will offered by the new young Emperor (he was later made a Saint for it) Austria was punished, and made progressively weaker during the post war years.

Chesterton went on to admit, “The Austrian Empire had its faults, and as I have said, even committed its crimes. But it was a world in which national types could live with some degree of liberality and ease; they were not all rolled out flat, as they were by the Kaisers and Czars… But I agree that some redistribution of Austro-Hungarian elements was reasonable enough… The vital point however, is that all this was done by men, who in the most definite sense, did not know what they were doing. They did not understand that, at its worst, there had always been a vast difference between the Austro-Hungarian compromise and the Prussian or Russian coercion. We ought to have weakened Prussia and if anything strengthened Austria. We did in fact weaken Austria and relatively strengthen Prussia… We shall go on making ghastly blunders, and paying for them, so long as the ideal of modern culture is concerned with what is called progress.”

Truth became Myth. In real life, the Von Trapps were devout Catholics, and whatever artistic license may have been taken in the original film, this fact still shone bright as day. The old monasteries dot the landscape, Church bells ring, and the crucifix sits on bedroom tables. Later in life, Maria Von Trapp, the real Maria Von Trapp, recalled the typical Sunday in rural Austria,

“On Sunday everyone puts on his finery. The Sunday dress is exactly what its name implies–clothing reserved to be worn only on Sunday. We may have one or the other “better dress” besides. We may have evening gowns, party dresses–but this one is our Sunday best, set aside for the day of the Lord. When we put it on, we invariably feel some of the Sunday spirit come over us. In those days everybody used to walk to church even though it might amount to a one or two hours’ hike down and up a mountain in rain or shine. Families usually went to the High Mass; only those who took care of the little children and the cooking had to go to the early Mass.

I feel sorry for everyone who has never experienced such a long, peaceful walk home from Sunday Mass, in the same way as I feel sorry for everyone who has never experienced the moments of twilight right after sunset before one would light the kerosene lamps. I know that automobiles and electric bulbs are more efficient, but still they are not complete substitutes for those other, more leisurely ways of living.

Throughout the country, all the smaller towns and villages have their cemeteries around the church; on Sunday, when the High Mass was over, the people would go and look for the graves of their dear ones, say a prayer, sprinkle holy water–a friendly Sunday visit with the family beyond the grave.

In most homes the Sunday dinner was at noon. The afternoon was often spent in visiting from house to house, especially visiting the sick. The young people would meet on the village green on Sunday afternoons for hours of folk dancing; the children would play games; the grownups would very often sit together and make music. Sunday afternoon was a time for rejoicing, for being happy, each in his own way.”

In the film, Maria is truly penitent and devout, despite her inability to please the other sisters at the abbey. Captain Von Trapp is a bit harder case. When we are introduced to him he seems to have all the coldness of Prussia, but in the film he undergoes such a change that only can be described as a conversion. In one scene he is mocking the idea that he is suited for a life secluded in his country manor surrounded by the flowers and the trees. In the next scene he sings a song dedicated the edelweiss, a flower that grows in the Alps.

The Sound of Music, then, is not some cliché Hollywood feel-good musical. It stands for real truths, and the tragic historical fact that a bright and singing religious culture was run over by a cold materialistic culture. Most of us do not know what is it like to live in a culture that sings. This is probably why The Sound of Music has come to be so closely associated with Christmas, as this season is probably the only remaining time of year where we sing together as a nation. Like the film, the season is still filled with religious imagery and importance. Perhaps we associate the film with Christmas because after we have completely stripped the other 364 days in the year of any religious meaning we find ourselves without any reason to sing, and we can’t begin to fathom why someone on a lonely hillside would suddenly burst into song.