The little girl peered out the train window at the green, rolling hills of Austria, the country she had visited in her mind every day for months.
“Dad,” she said, “Maria was on one of those mountains!” Her eyes lit up.
The Austrians around us did not stir.
It has been 60 years since the Julie Andrews classic “The Sound of Music” opened in movie theaters. It still enchants American viewers, but, despite bringing millions of dollars in tourism revenue to their country each year, it befuddles many Austrians.
For all those Austrians: The film tells the story of a nun who becomes a governess to seven Austrian children, brightens their lives with song, marries their father and helps everyone flee the Nazis. It is oh-so-loosely based on the lives of the singing Von Trapp family, who escaped Hitler and settled in Vermont, where they still run a cozy lodge with excellent pretzels.
Generations of Americans have obsessed over the film. They include my wife, Lily, who watched it repeatedly on VHS as a child, and my 4-year-old daughter, Nora, whose maternal grandmother streamed the movie for her last year.
The film sustained my daughter through our family move to Germany this year. In the dead of the Berlin winter, while we waited for our furniture and a preschool opening, Nora watched it on repeat. She renamed several stuffed animals after Von Trapp children — Friedrich the bear, Gretl the elephant — and directed them in live productions. Her Dolly does an excellent “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.”
Many mornings I found her stuffed friends on the couch, lined up in rows like airline passengers.
“We are flying to Austria,” she would announce.
So, like hundreds of thousands of other tourists each year, our family booked a “Sound of Music” tour this summer. In the Alps, my wife filmed our daughter twirling, arms out, singing “The hills are alive!” Then we rolled on to Salzburg, where most of the film’s iconic scenes were shot.
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We were celebrating something many Austrians had never seen.
I had heard this but didn’t quite believe it. So I asked around. After an interview with the country’s vice chancellor, Andreas Babler, in Vienna, I mentioned my upcoming Salzburg trip and inquired if his young daughter knew the movie.
“My daughter saw ‘Rigoletto’” in Salzburg, he said. (That’s an Italian opera, not a musical.) “She saw ‘Carmen.’ No, she didn’t see ‘The Sound of Music.’”
“I only learned about it when I was in my 20s,” a sociologist at the Vienna University of Economics and Business, Judith Kohlenberger, told me.
Leo Bauernberger, the managing director of Salzburg’s tourism office, was living in New York City in the late 1980s when some pals invited him to a singalong showing on the Upper West Side. He had to look the film up in a bookstore.
“Everyone adores it,” Peter Husty, the chief curator of the Salzburg Museum, told me over coffee. “But not in Salzburg.”
ImageA bus tour for fans stops at locations in Salzburg that were featured in the film.
There are competing theories for why the movie, and the stage musical that preceded it, never made a splash here. Perhaps Austrians did not want to revisit the trauma of Nazi invasion, or to see some of their countrymen portrayed as collaborators. Or maybe they’d gotten their Von Trapp fill from a German movie produced years earlier, which hewed closer to the family’s real story and featured actual Austrian folk songs.
Mr. Husty, who first watched “The Sound of Music” when he was preparing to curate an exhibition on the real Von Trapp story, loves its songs but not its geography. The family appears to cross a mountain into Switzerland on its trip to freedom. Actually, that route would have taken them straight to Germany.
Still, Salzburg is enthusiastically hosting special events to honor the film’s anniversary this year, including a gala celebration in October. Next year, it plans to open a museum devoted to the film and the Von Trapps.
“‘The Sound of Music’ is a very strong product here.” Mr. Bauernberger, the Salzburg tourism official, said. “It’s a privilege, absolutely.”
On our family train trip to Salzburg, Nora rewatched the movie wearing headphones. Her singalong squeals shattered the quiet of the car: “When the dog bites! When the bee stings!”
She spent the next two days playing on her real-life movie set. At the Residence Fountain, she splashed as Maria (the nun) did when she sang “I Have Confidence.”
In the Mirabell Garden, we watched as tourists speaking Italian, Chinese and English recreated the children’s “Do-Re-Mi” dance moves on marble steps while friends filmed on their phones. Nora hopped alongside.
At the Leopoldskron Palace, which served as the exterior of the family’s house in the film, we joined a “Picnic in the Park” that was like one of Nora’s home re-enactments, but with real people in the roles of her stuffed friends.
“Where are we going?” I asked Nora, who rode my shoulders on the walk from downtown.
“Their house!” she said.
“They sing at their house! You remember? Ed-el-weiss!”
The performance started inside because of rain. Eventually the drizzle slowed and the second half played out by a small lake, where the family capsizes a rowboat in a scene that always makes Nora laugh. She seemed skeptical of this show. But when Maria strummed the first notes of “Do-Re-Mi,” she pushed back her soaked curls and beamed. The audience was full of little girls and boys, some whispering in English, some in German, most of them smiling, too.
Not just children. After the show, my wife noticed what appeared to be a British punk band, mugging for photos in front of the lake. They turned out to be members of a touring company of “Cats” (that’s a stage musical) that had just finished a run of shows in nearby Linz, on a daylong pilgrimage to “Sound of Music” locations.
Why, I asked? Sixty years later, why are people still building trips around this movie?
ImageTourists applauding at the end of a scene.
They recalled a conversation from the night before, when they rewatched it as a group.
“Say the world was ending, like now, and you had to choose 10 films to sum up humanity,” said Lucy May Barker, who plays Grizabella in the “Cats” production. She turned to her castmate, Michael Robert-Lowe. “You said ‘The Sound of Music’ would be one of them, because of the lessons it teaches everyone.”
“Yeah,” Mr. Robert-Lowe said. “The power of music itself to move people and bring people together.”
“The battle of good and evil and them eventually escaping, I think, is wonderful,” added the resident director, Dane Quixall. “They prevail and they get over the mountains and they escape and they beg off to a fantastic life.”
We thanked the cast and snapped photos by the lake. Nora glanced at a rope swing hanging from a tree. It wasn’t in the movie.
“Why is there a swing there?” she asked.
When you’re 4 years old, my wife and I discussed later, it might be hard to distinguish the Austria you saw on the screen from the one you see in front of you.
No matter. In Salzburg, they both exist — for little children, and anyone who wants to feel like one.
New York Times News Service