Through the fall and winter months of the U.S. concert season, no group travels farther and gives more performances than the Trapp Family Singers (last season: 125 concerts from coast to coast). When summer comes, the Trapps retire to their 660-acre farm in the Green Mountains near Stowe, Vt. and let lovers of Bach, Palestrina and Vittoria come and sing with them.
Last week, some 60 devotees—teenagers to greybeards—from 17 states had arrived at the converted CCC barracks near the Trapp Farm for the first of four summer "Sing Weeks." They paid from $70 to $90 apiece for ten days' board & room and the chance to study church music and folk songs with the Trapps and their music director, Father Franz Wasner, who is also the family chaplain.
Headaches in a Convent. Each day follows much the same pattern. Chapel is held at 8 a.m. Breakfast follows. Then campers have two hours of a capella singing (usually including a Bach chorale or two) under Father Wasner. After lunch, Father Wasner gives a lecture on musical history, and directs a pickup orchestra and the singers through 16th-18th Century choral works.
Afternoon classes in the recorder, an antique flute, are held by the Trapp girls. After supper, the campers do folk dances. When one youngster suggested going into Stowe for a movie one night last week, he was gently but firmly frowned down.
For the Trapps, the camp is far more than a musical outing; it is their own family experiment in living. Since the death of Baron von Trapp in 1947, the experiment has been presided over by handsome Maria Augusta Trapp, a woman with the charm and will of a medieval matriarch.
As a novice in a Salzburg convent, Maria Augusta began to get "bad headaches," she says, and her superiors decided to give her a vacation helping care for the seven children of the widowed Baron Georg von Trapp. Maria Augusta married the baron, bore him three children.
All the Trapps sang and in 1937 Soprano Lotte Lehmann heard them at it. She insisted that they enter choral competition at the Salzburg Festival that year. They took first prize, but never sang at Salzburg again; ardently Roman Catholic and ardently anti-Nazi, they left home just before Hitler seized Austria.
Mayonnaise on Pears. In 1938, the Trapps arrived in the U.S. with $4 in pocket and a concert contract in hand. Father Wasner came along as the family chaplain, by special dispensation of his bishop. "How I hated this country at first," Mrs. Trapp says. "Oblong envelopes and mayonnaise on pears!" But the family was soon making $1,000 a concert, and she thought better of the country. "It's so big," she exclaims, "and I love to make long-distance calls!" All the Trapps are now U.S. citizens, have dropped their titles and the "von."
With their new riches, the Trapps "bought a view" in Vermont. A few weeks after they moved in, the old farmhouse came down in a windstorm. They have rebuilt it into a handsome, 20-room Tyrolean manor house. In winter, while the family is on concert tour, the house will be used as a hostelry for skiers.