‘The hills are alive...’

Dr Ian Bradley reflects on the Christian influences of the film The Sound of Music which celebrates the 60th anniversary of its release this year.

EDELWEISS, Do-Re-Mi, The Lonely Goatherd, My Favourite Things, and, of course, Climb Ev’ry Mountain – It is hard to think of a more singable or moving set of songs than those found in the film version of The Sound of Music which first played in UK cinemas on March 29 1965.

Sixty years on, it remains one of the best loved and most iconic musicals, still regularly screened on television on Christmas Day. The singalong version continues to attract cinema goers dressed as nuns, Nazis, or even brown paper packages tied up with string, and I’m sure I am not the only minister who has themed services around it.

The Sound of Music is also one of the most explicitly Christian of all musicals. I cannot think of any other which gives such a sympathetic portrayal of the dedicated religious life as represented by the nuns of Nonnberg Abbey and their wise mother abbess. The songs are laden with religious references and imagery. In her opening number, Maria sings of ‘the chime of a church’, a ‘lark who is learning to pray’, and her heart being ‘blessed with the sound of music’. For one of the students in my Sacred Music class at St Andrews University, How do you solve a problem like Maria has the status of a sacred song. He feels that it points to both the inward and outward nature of the dedicated religious life and draws particular attention to the line ‘her penitence is real’. I myself see significant spiritual resonances in The Lonely Goatherd, a phrase which captures both the isolation and the task of pastoral ministry, and I have used it in clergy training. It is the only musical I know that ends with a direct Biblical quotation, significantly coming from the mouth of the mother abbess who quotes Isaiah 55:12: For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing.

The Sound of Music is essentially a story about vocation and how God is calling each of us to find ours. The key moment comes when Maria returns to the convent from which she had been sent as a governess to the von Trapp family. She has fallen in love with the widowed captain, and he with her, but she has yet to come to terms with this. Confused and bewildered, she approaches the abbess expecting to be told to persist with the life of a cloistered nun to which she has dedicated herself. Instead, sensing her feelings for the captain and for his children, the wise abbess tells her that she must return to them and that that is where God wants her to be. In the film this scene is given added religious atmosphere in the way that it is acted out in front of a crucifix standing on an altar with a soundtrack of subdued organ chords.

The musical is based on the true story of Maria Augusta Kutschera who became Maria von Trapp. Focusing it especially on the theme of vocation was suggested to Oscar Hammerstein and Richard Rodgers by Sister Gregory Duffy, a Dominican nun who was brought in as an adviser on the religious aspects of the show. In briefing notes, she reflected on the way that the generosity and capacity for love that had attracted Maria to the religious life in the first place began to deepen and expand as for the first time she knew a man as a friend and slowly began to be attracted to him.

Now Maria was in a position to make an honest choice, because she could understand the power of human love as well as spiritual love. This was the moment her superior had been waiting for, because now Maria could answer the question: ‘How does God wish me to use my capacity to love?’ And her answer was: to spend it in the heart of the Trapp family. In fact, to become the heart of the Trapp family. There was no stigma attached to the choice. It was not a declaration that she loved God less and people more, but rather, a recognition of the road she was meant to travel from the beginning.

In the musical, the mother abbess’ teaching about discerning one’s God–given vocation is crystallised in the song Climb Ev’ry Mountain, perhaps the most churchlike of the great Rodgers and Hammerstein anthems. Hammerstein initially entitled it ‘Face Life’ and outlined its theme in a note scribbled on an early draft: ‘You can’t hide here. Don’t think these walls shut out problems. You have to face life wherever you are. You have to look for life, for the life you were meant to lead. Until you find it you are not living.’ In its original version, the song was much longer and contained the line ‘Love isn’t love till you give it away’ later inserted into the duet ‘You are sixteen, going on seventeen’.

In its final form Climb Ev’ry Mountain was pared down to two simple stanzas and given a solemn yet soaring tune by Rodgers who marked the score ‘with deep feeling like a prayer’. After she first heard it Sister Gregory wrote: It’s a beautiful song and drove me to the Chapel. It made me acutely aware of how tremendously fortunate are those who find the dream that will absorb all their love, and finding it, embrace it to the end. As usual, Mr Rodgers has done a beautiful job. However, it was the lyric that sent me to the Chapel. Hammerstein’s lyrics are a unique combination of simplicity, sincerity, a sort of humorous tenderness, and exquisite imagery.

There was, in fact, a distinct Scottish element to Oscar Hammerstein’s own spirituality which is almost completely unknown and has been largely ignored by his biographers. His maternal grandparents were devout Presbyterians who had emigrated from Glasgow to New York.

In unpublished letters to his son which I have read for my forthcoming book Music of the Night, Hammerstein writes of their profound influence on him. They lived together in the same house and in his early years he even shared a bed with his grandmother. His mother, Alice, retained a deep if somewhat unorthodox Christian faith and sent young Oscar to Sunday School where he was strongly influenced by the idealist liberal Protestant theology of the pastor, Dr Frank Hall.

Hall was, I am quite sure, the model for Dr Seldon who speaks at the high school graduation at the end of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Carousel, and introduces their other great anthem-like song, You’ll Never Walk Alone. Significantly, Hammerstein originally portrayed Seldon as the local pastor although he later changed him to the family doctor.

“The Sound of Music is also one of the most explicitly Christian of all musicals. I cannot think of any other which gives such a sympathetic portrayal of the dedicated religious life as represented by the nuns of Nonnberg Abbey and their wise mother abbess.

I trust that particularly here in the Church of Scotland the 60th anniversary of The Sound of Music, with its Scottish Presbyterian roots, will be celebrated by churches, guilds and choirs. Let’s have lots of singalong performances of this most evergreen and enduring of all musicals with its irresistible feelgood factor and its Christian message. After all, when you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything!

Ian Bradley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Spiritual History at the University of St Andrews where for twenty years he taught the only university course in the world on the theology and spirituality of musical theatre. His book, Music of the Night: Religious Influences and Spiritual Resonances in Operetta and Musical Theatre will be published in May by Oxford University Press.