THE MUSICALS THAT MADE ME #1 - The Sound of Music
Music, Motherhood & Myth. How The Sound of Music defined my Christmas.
The Sound of Music was first broadcast on the BBC on Christmas Day in 1978. That winter blizzards raged and the whole city was covered in a blanket of thick white snow. It was the first time I saw snow, the first time I experienced how it silences a city. I remember sitting at the windowsill in our front room on that Christmas Day gazing out the window as the street turned white before my eyes. Even though The Sound of Music isn’t set at Christmas and it never mentions Christmas once, in my house The Sound of Music is a Christmas movie.
If I close my eyes I’m back in that Kilburn living room on Christmas Day. All my memories of that living room are drenched in orange: an orange three bar electric fire, tobacco stained wallpaper (because everyone smoked indoors), red velour sofa rubbed threadbare at the arms with orange cushions squashed in each corner, the red nylon carpet, polyester curtains in red and brown geometric shapes. Seeping round the curtains, the sodium vapour street light outside the window turning everything to sepia.
Memories overlap. That is how memory works. We rewrite, edit, and construct new memories in order to make sense of the past. I can reconstruct that room, partly from memory, partly from later films or tv set in the era, partly from a photograph.
The family is standing in front of the curtains. My sister, curlers in her hair, poses for the photographer. My brother, centre, always centre, scowls down the lens, all fury and intensity. I am off to the side, wary, strawberry blonde curls falling across my face, feminine, staring vacantly out of frame. Across the decades my mother radiates out of that photograph. I am struck, always, by her beauty. Her black hair teased fashionably high, she is giving Joan Collins, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn. She appears to be in her own world. There is an aura around her in this photograph, in all photographs: aloof, unknowable. From this one photograph, I can fill in other details of the room and of my childhood.
In the middle of that 1978 Christmas Day, amidst all the noise and dance and excitement of a family Christmas, The Sound of Music begins in a moment of absolute peace and solitude. In the silence of a city covered in snow, music enters. Memory dissolves into cinema, the orange polyester curtains fade to alpine green. We are high up in snow-topped mountains with only the lightest breath of wind. As the camera pans down across the mountains, the seasons seem to change, the snow fades away to verdant trees and lush green fields. The winter retreats, we hear the woodwind of the orchestra high up, like birdsong. Then, a majestic brass motif indicating something momentous is about to occur, and finally the camera comes to rest on a solitary figure on a mountain top. As we move in we see it is a young woman; she stretches her arms, she begins to twirl, she opens her mouth and she sings, “The hills are alive with the sound of music, with songs we have sung for a thousand years. The hills fill my heart with the sound of music…”. It is an iconic opening. This is the same choreography you see at rock concerts. They begin with the star on high at the back, raised up, demanding adulation from the crowd. Then, during the show the untouchable star slowly descends to the level of the audience. The lyric reminds us first of the age of the hills and then brings us to their effect on the individual. From the first moment we see Maria we know that she is special, unique, the chosen one. Her descent from the mountain is a mythic journey: she moves from a high, free space into the structured world, first the convent then the Von Trapp household as healer and saviour. This descent marks the beginning of her transformation into a maternal figure, the mythos of motherhood. In The Sound of Music the mythos of motherhood is expressed through her nurturing presence and moral guidance. This descent echoes ancient myths in which women bring creation rather than conquest.
The mythic mother as maternal archetype is a key concept in literature. Mother as protector, nurturer. In some mythologies the granter of boons, in others she is dangerous, sometimes destructive. Maria embodies a specific maternal archetype: the virgin mother. She is young, innocent. I think of my own mother who came to London in her late teens, barely a child herself when she had her first child, my sister.
The Sound of Music presents a layered and complex vision of Motherhood. There are four versions of Motherhood in The Sound of Music; the children’s biological mother who, despite not appearing or even having a name in the film, is ever present, the Mother Abbess, the Baroness Schraeder, and Maria herself.
In her absence, the children’s biological mother offers a view of Motherhood by showing us what replaces it: the Captain’s rules and order and structure. The children long for a connection that he cannot provide. Where once there may have been comfort now there is regime.
The Mother Abbess models motherhood for Maria. Her convent is the place where Maria retreats when she is scared. She demonstrates a love that guides without suffocating, she sees Maria’s truth before Maria sees it herself and encourages her to pursue it. In her hymn of self-actualisation, Climb Ev’ry Mountain, in her framing and the way she is lit, she is presented as Maria’s guide.
The Baroness is not interested in motherhood, she does not understand it. She is planning to send the children to “a delightful little thing called boarding school” and in her company, the children are reserved, awkward. The Baroness already has a title and she does not intend to relinquish it for the title of Mother.
Maria does not have a title. We learn this early in the first scene when the nuns in the convent are introduced in the libretto by their titles; Reverend Mother, the Mistress of Novices, the Mistress of Postulants, Sister Berthe, Sister Margaretta and so on. Maria is only Maria. In a world where all adults have a title; Captain, Uncle, Sister, Maria stands alone.
Maria’s journey to Motherhood is a driving function of the plot. She begins as a novice, literally. She is a clown, a darling, a demon, flighty, unpredictable - a girl. She is also “a lamb” - a Christian synonym for saviour. She leaves her own mother, the Mother Abbess, and begins her journey to adulthood. We journey with her as she learns responsibility and what it means to be needed, as she falls in love. Having found her way to the convent in order to be part of the community, now she finds herself forming a community of her own, a family. It is wholesome and pure and virginal.
I see my own mother in all of these. Loving but distant, guiding but strict, perhaps not ready for motherhood herself. In 1978 my mother’s parents visited us from Ireland. I remember my grandmother as a strict, indomitable woman, strong in the way that Irish women of her generation were. She was not a frequent visitor to the UK and I wonder who, in her absence, had modelled Motherhood for my mother. Who taught my mother how to be a mother?
Madame Rose, Fantine, Golde, Kim, Zsa Zsa, Donna Sheridan, Norma Desmond and on, and on, and on. Whatever kind of mother you’re looking for you’ll find it in musical theatre. Musicals do mythic mothers really well. A mother’s singing is, after all, probably one of the first songs we ever hear as newborns, no wonder musicals can feel like home. Before we understood language we understood lullaby, and musicals speak to a part of us formed in the cradle when music meant safety. My mother tells me that my favourite lullaby as a child was Rock-A-Bye-Baby. Like many lullabies the lyrics are decidedly creepy, almost threatening. Lullabies are less about comforting a child than they are about preparing a child for a world full of danger. They are tiny musicals, the first musicals we encounter, the story told through song. Mothers and musicals both cradle us and confront us. They teach, they soothe, they scare us into strength. No wonder musicals feel like home to me. On that Christmas Day in 1978 I realised I understood something about the world I did not understand before. Music, singing, could make the world a better place. You could sing your inner thoughts, your hidden passions. Music and song enable you to express yourself without fear. In musical theatre, I had found my safe place.
I watched The Sound of Music on Christmas Day this year and it felt powerfully comforting and exceptionally nostalgic. But nostalgic for what, exactly? Nostalgia isn’t solely personal. The Sound of Music trades in a form of national nostalgia too. In 1959, when the stage show came out The Sound of Music looked back to pre-Anschluss, pre-Kristallnacht Austria in 1938, a moment in time when the world teetered on a knife edge. But The Sound of Music isn’t really about Austria in 1938. Like so many American musicals, particularly those of the Golden Age, The Sound of Music is mythologising America itself, or the version it wants to believe in. In 1959 The Sound of Music is reflecting on post-war America, defining society’s virtues, documenting who America is, what it will become and what values matter to it. In 1965 when the film was released those conversations were just as important. Once again America was defining itself on a world stage. The Sound of Music was a form of soft propaganda inviting viewers to ask Who are we? What matters? And the answer returns: Faith, Family, Community. Art becomes manifesto.
The Sound of Music is about the power of a community. Maria’s triumph is not an individual conquest, it is a triumph of family over everything else. How much of it is historically accurate doesn’t matter, it sells us a myth of nostalgia, of motherhood, of community. It teaches us about family and togetherness. It models redemption. That’s why it’s a Christmas film, not because of snow or presents or tinsel but because it shows us that music, community and family (whether found or biological) can triumph over evil. That we are strongest when we are unified.
Musicals ask us to believe in myths. At Christmas that seems possible.