The Trapp Family (also known as the von Trapp Family) were a singing group formed from the family of former Austrian naval commander Georg von Trapp. The family achieved fame in their original singing career in their native Austria during the interwar period. They also performed in the United States before emigrating there permanently to escape the deteriorating situation in Austria leading up to World War II. In the United States, they became well known as the "Trapp Family Singers" until they ceased to perform as a unit in 1957. The family's story later served as the basis for a memoir, two German films, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical The Sound of Music. The last surviving of the original seven (born to Captain von Trapp and his late wife Agathe Whitehead), Maria Franziska, died in 2014 at the age of 99. The youngest and last surviving member of the Trapp Family Singers (born to the Captain von Trapp and Maria von Trapp) is Johannes von Trapp.
Biography
History of the group
Georg von Trapp had seven children at the time of the death of his first wife, Agathe Whitehead, and in 1927 he married Maria Kutschera, who was twenty-five years his junior, and had three more children with her. Both parts of the family were musical, and by 1935 the family was singing at the local church in Aigen, where they made the acquaintance of a young priest, Dr Franz Wasner, who encouraged their musical progress and taught them sacred music to add to the folk songs, madrigals and ballads they were already singing. Whilst singing at their Salzburg home they were also heard by the German concert singer Lotte Lehmann, who persuaded them to take part in the song competition in Salzburg in 1936, for which they won a prize; after this, accompanied by Dr Wasner, the family toured and performed in Vienna and Salzburg, and undertook a European tour that encompassed France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and England.
When Adolf Hitler annexed Austria in 1938, the family decided to leave, first for Italy (of which the Zadar-born Georg and thus the family were legally citizens). For some months in 1938, just after their flight, they lived in Warmond, near The Hague, Netherlands, as the guests of a Dutch banker, Ernest Menten. This episode is described by local historian Miep Smitsloo in her 2007 Dutch book 'Tussen Tol en Trekvaart' ('Between Toll and Canal'). In her account of the flight, Maria von Trapp does not mention this stay. From there they went to London and then to the United States, where they stayed until the expiration of their visas. After touring in Scandinavia, they returned to the United States on September 7, 1939, and applied for immigrant status. They arrived with very little money, having lost most of the family fortune earlier during a 1935 banking collapse in Austria. Once in the United States they earned money by performing and touring nationally and internationally, first as the "Trapp Family Choir" and then, the "Trapp Family Singers", a change suggested by their booking agent Frederick Christian Schang. After living for a short time in Philadelphia and then Merion, Pennsylvania, where their youngest child Johannes was born, the family settled in Stowe, Vermont, in 1941. They purchased a farm in 1942 and converted it into the Trapp Family Lodge, initially called "Cor Unum" (Latin for One Heart). After World War II, they founded the Trapp Family Austrian Relief fund, which sent food and clothing to people impoverished in Austria. By now based permanently in the United States, the family performed their unique mixture of liturgical music, madrigals, folk music and instrumentals to audiences in over 30 countries for the next 20 years. They made a series of 78-rpm records for RCA Victor in the 1950s, some of which were later issued on RCA Camden LPs. There were also a few later recordings released on LPs, including some stereo sessions. The family singing group disbanded in 1957.