Austrian family of singers, the Trapps performed professionally from the mid-1930s to 1955. The story of the Trapp Family was made into a popular Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical, The Sound of Music (1959), that proved one of the most successful in theater history. The Trapp Family’s story was also the basis for a 1965 film starring Julie Andrews that had comparable success.
Maria Augusta Kutschera, the best-known member of the family, was born January 26, 1905, in Vienna, Austria. In her book, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers (1949), she recounted her experience as an orphan and as a novice in a Benedictine convent in Salzburg. She became a governess for the seven children of a widower, Freiherr (Baron) Georg von Trapp, a World War I submarine commander. She was married to Trapp in 1927, and they had three children of their own. In the mid-1930s the family began singing German and liturgical music under the tutelage of the Reverend Franz Wasner, who continued as their director. In 1937 the Trapp Family Choir made their first European tour as professional singers. With Father Wasner, the family fled in 1938 from Nazi-dominated Austria to Italy (Switzerland in the play and movie) and then immigrated to the United States. There, as the Trapp Family Singers, they developed a program of folk and other music that appealed to audiences worldwide. They toured in many countries from 1940 until 1955, when the group disbanded.
Georg von Trapp died in 1947. Maria Augusta, who with other family members became a naturalized American citizen in 1948, helped manage a resort and ski lodge in Stowe, Vermont, from the 1940s on. She also conducted a summer music camp there until 1956. The Trapp Family Austrian Relief, Inc., was established in 1947. Maria Augusta died March 28, 1987, in Morrisville, Vermont.