VIENNA (AFP) ― The Salzburg Museum unveiled Wednesday a new exhibit with all aspects of the “Sound of Music” from the von Trapp family’s real lives to the massively successful 1965 Oscar-winning film.
Using 180 items from several collections in the United States and Europe, some of which have never been seen before, it explores the runaway popularity of the singing-and-dancing family both before and after World War II.
“There probably isn’t a town with more than 50,000 people in America where we didn’t perform,” Johannes von Trapp, whose mother Maria Augusta von Trapp was played by Julie Andrews in the movie, said in Salzburg on Wednesday.
The second half of the exhibition focuses on the film, one of the most successful of all time, and includes 15 different versions of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s song “Do-re-mi,” including in Hebrew, Japanese and Icelandic.
Even though the film attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists to Salzburg every year, the “Sound of Music” has long been ignored by locals, and it was only last month that the feel-good musical was performed there for the first time.
Museum director Erich Marx said part of the reason for this was that inhabitants were uncomfortable with the fact that the von Trapp family had to flee Austria because of the Nazis.
“I think it is to do with shame and a bad conscience that we in Salzburg were also responsible for the courageous Baron von Trapp and his family ending up in the awkward situation they did,” he said.
The exhibition opens on Friday and runs until November 2012.
