Opera, Idealization, and the Superficial: The Musical Context of The Sound of Music
The first time I saw The Sound of Music was as part of a Christmas movie series on public television. Every night leading up to the holiday my siblings and I would curl up at the foot of our parents’ bed and fall asleep watching the night’s Christmas movie. Amidst the lineup of Hallmark films and children’s holiday classics was this musical film from 1965 about a large, dysfunctional family learning to function again in pre-war Austria. As a child, I didn’t give much note to the film’s context and simply enjoyed watching the von Trapp children dance around and sing songs about bedtimes, trinkets, and the notes of the major scale. However, having recently given the film a rewatch, the historical context becomes much more significant as an adult.
How did The Sound of Music become a feel-good classic and holiday film when the underlying plot concerning the Anchsluss is so dark? When the film ends with the family’s harrowing flight into the mountains away from the Nazi soldiers trying to forcibly recruit Captain von Trapp into the military? The answer to these questions lies in the nature of The Sound of Music as a musical film—the genre is implemented in a way that allows the deeper issues to be sidestepped. The Sound of Music draws heavily from the opus of Romantic composers like Richard Wagner, using the placement and structure of songs to detract from the darker undertones and thematic elements at play: this is an experiment with the power of music to idealize and to romanticize, lending superficiality and feel-good vibes to the story in opposition to its clumsily structured plot.
The songs we hear throughout The Sound of Music are very operatic, which allows the filmmakers to get away with saying little at important junctures. Inspired by the lush harmonies and dramatic orchestrations of Wagner and Verdi, these songs ignore lyrical eloquence in favor of effective musical structure. Furthermore, the operatic delivery given by the actors and instrumental interludes characteristic of classical operatic structure make the frequent musical scenes feel heavily staged and consequently highly superficial and divorced from reality. The lyrics and “message” of most of these songs are trivial, and what’s important is the emotional effect on the audience. For example, in “Do Re Mi” the same trivial lyrics are repeated over and over: what’s important is how the melodic lines are separated, developed, and overlapped to create structural tension and build up to a magnificent, euphoric climax delivered by all the singers. Every song is crafted as an opera tune, allowing the filmmakers to give us one dopamine hit after another through melodies, staging, and dances that do nothing to expand upon the plot and exist solely to make us feel good.
As a result of this musical playground, by the time we reach the family’s flight from Austria the sudden attempt at creating tension feels rather out of place. After all, we’ve just spent two hours hearing children sing songs about solfege. Why are we suddenly running from the Nazis? Once the von Trapp family makes it into the mountains and the ending credits roll, we do not leave the theater (or our couch) thinking about the historical context of the film, but thinking about the music and the dancing – and perhaps feeling a little confused as to why the Nazis were included in the first place.
While it may be easy to write this off as awkward writing and call it a day, this does present an interesting conundrum concerning musicals, and The Sound of Music in particular. Musical theater is often a vehicle through which artists choose to address controversial social issues and darker topics, precisely because of the characteristics I discussed above. A musical can momentarily remove the focus away from the issue at hand and place emphasis in the music, dancing, and colorful staging. This allows artists to gently introduce difficult topics by framing them in spectacle.
The issue is that at some point you need to rip away the spectacle and stare the issue in the face. Some musicals do a great job building up to this. For example, West Side Story is a famous musical that addresses racial tension between Puerto Rican immigrants and the white “natives” in New York City. While much of the musical is fun and cheerful and centers on a love story (on the surface), it aggressively ramps up to directly dealing with sexual assault and murder, forcing us to come to terms with the underlying conflicts. In contrast, by confining all the tension to the last twenty minutes of the film and allowing the von Trapp family to escape completely unharmed, The Sound of Music continues to evade the deeper points, avoiding confronting the reality of its own context in favor of remaining fun and PG. While this may appeal to a broader audience and allow The Sound of Music to be classified as a Christmas film, it also makes it feel watered down, leaving viewers wanting more.
The Sound of Music is undoubtedly a great film, but it is also a little clumsy. It is a film that doesn’t know how to end itself contextually. We are given two hours of opera – two hours of romanticized interpersonal conflict – two hours of dancing and innocence – and are then expected to be satisfied with a “climax” hastily shoved into the last twenty minutes of screentime. I love musicals, whether on stage or through film, and at the end of the day The Sound of Music could’ve done so much better. But while it may not be the greatest work of art, I do respect what it offers musically. The next time you watch The Sound of Music, watch it as an opera. Enjoy the brilliant structure of the songs and the lavish cinematography while accepting the awkward ending and the frustrating superficiality. If you’re any kind of film or opera nerd, then it’s worth it for “Do Re Mi.”