History, The Sound of Music, and Us

By Raymond Knapp

At one point late in the 1965 film of The Sound of Music, the secular world of Broadway and old-world Catholicism clash horribly, when the song "Maria" (better known as "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?") is dressed up in the garb of a magisterial organ processional; the moment seems particularly unfortunate because Richard Rodgers manages earlier in the show to provide Catholic service music that is, indeed, serviceable ("Preludium: Dixit Dominus, Morning Hymn, Angelus Bells, Alleluia"). There is, of course, an appalling logic to the transformation of "Maria," for the event being celebrated‹ her wedding to the captain‹does in fact solve the nuns� Maria problem. But if there is a failing of sensibility here, what follows immediately is a clash even more horribly jarring, with no less appalling logic; yet this clash entails no such failing and may be counted, if not a masterstroke, at least a stroke that bears witness to how many masters of musical theater and film stood behind it (these included Rodgers, Hammerstein, Lindsay, and Crouse, who created the underlying plot situation for the 1959 stage show, and Ernest Lehman and Robert Wise, who wrote the screenplay and directed). As the wedding concludes, an eerie application of associational montage merges the celebratory wedding bells directly into the deeper bells celebrating the Anschluss, the "peaceful" annexation of Austria by Germany.1