The Sound Of Music is still alive in Austria’s hills 60 years on

SALZBURG, Austria – 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 cinemas. It still enchants American viewers, but – despite bringing millions of dollars in tourism revenue to their country each year – befuddles many Austrians.

For all those Austrians: The 1965 film tells the story of a nun named Maria (Andrews) 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 German dictator Adolf Hitler and settled in Vermont in the United States, where they still run a cosy lodge with excellent pretzels.

Generations of Americans have obsessed over the Hollywood musical film. They include my wife Lily, who watched it repeatedly on videotape as a child, and my four-year-old daughter Nora, whose maternal grandmother streamed the movie for her in 2024.

The Sound Of Music sustained my daughter through our family move to Germany in 2025. In the dead of the Berlin winter, while we waited for our furniture and a pre-school 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 The 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.

Never made a splash in Austria

We were celebrating something many Austrians had never seen.

I had heard this, but did not quite believe it. So I asked around. After an interview with Austrian 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 is an Italian opera, not a musical. “She saw Carmen. No, she didn’t see The Sound Of Music.”

“I learnt about it only when I was in my 20s,” said sociologist Judith Kohlenberger at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Mr Leo Bauernberger, 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 in the Upper West Side. He had to look the film up in a bookstore.

“Everyone adores it,” Mr Peter Husty, chief curator of the Salzburg Museum, told me over coffee. “But not in Salzburg.”

There are competing theories for why the movie, and the 1959 stage musical that preceded it, never made a splash here.

Perhaps Austrians did not want to revisit the trauma of Nazi invasion, or see some of their countrymen portrayed as collaborators.

Or maybe they had 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.

Embracing movie’s 60th anniversary

Still, Salzburg is enthusiastically hosting special events to honour the film’s 60th anniversary in 2025, including a gala celebration in October. In 2026, it plans to open a museum devoted to the film and the Von Trapps.

“The Sound Of Music is a very strong product here,” said Mr Bauernberger. “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 Residence Fountain, she splashed as Maria did when she sang I Have Confidence.

In Mirabell Garden, we watched as tourists speaking Italian, Mandarin and English recreated the children’s Do-Re-Mi dance moves on marble steps while friends filmed on their phones. Nora hopped alongside.

At 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 on my shoulders on the walk from downtown.

“Their house,” she said. “They sing at their house. You remember? Edelweiss.”

The performance started inside because of the 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 sceptical 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 stage musical Cats that had just finished a run of shows in nearby Linz, on a day-long pilgrimage to The Sound Of Music locations.

Why, I asked? Sixty years later, why are people still building trips around this movie?

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,” Lowe said. “The power of music to move people and bring people together.” NYTIMES