History of the group Georg von Trapp had seven children at the time of the death of his first wife,
Agathe Whitehead, and in 1927 he married
Maria Kutschera, who was twenty-five years his junior, and had three more children with her. Both parts of the family were musical, and by 1935 the family was singing at the local church in
Aigen, where they made the acquaintance of a young priest, Dr.
Franz Wasner, who encouraged their musical progress and taught them sacred music to add to the folk songs, madrigals, and ballads they were already singing. Whilst singing at their Salzburg home, they were also heard by the German concert singer
Lotte Lehmann, who persuaded them to take part in the song competition in Salzburg in 1936, for which they won a prize; after this, accompanied by Dr. Wasner, the family toured and performed in Vienna and Salzburg and undertook a European tour that encompassed France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and England. In her account of the flight, Maria von Trapp does not mention this stay. From there they went to London and then to the United States, where they stayed until the expiration of their visas. After touring in Scandinavia, they returned to the United States on September 7, 1939, and applied for immigrant status. They arrived with very little money, having lost most of the family fortune earlier during a 1935 banking collapse in Austria. Once in the United States, they earned money by performing and touring nationally and internationally, first as the "Trapp Family Choir" and then the "Trapp Family Singers", a change suggested by their booking agent
Frederick Christian Schang. After living for a short time in
Philadelphia and then
Merion, Pennsylvania, where their youngest child
Johannes was born, the family settled in
Stowe, Vermont, in 1941. They purchased a farm in 1942 and converted it into the
Trapp Family Lodge, initially called "Cor Unum" (Latin for
One Heart). After
World War II, they founded the
Trapp Family Austrian Relief fund, which sent food and clothing to people impoverished in Austria. By now based permanently in the United States, the family performed their unique mixture of liturgical music, madrigals, folk music and instrumentals to audiences in over 30 countries for the next 20 years. They made a series of 78 rpm records for
RCA Victor in the 1950s, some of which were later issued on
RCA Camden LPs. There were also a few later recordings released on LPs, including some stereo sessions. The family singing group disbanded in 1957. , 27 September 1941. Maria wrote an account of the singing family
The Story of the Trapp Family Singers which was published in 1949. It was the inspiration for the 1956 West German film
The Trapp Family, which in turn inspired
Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1959 Broadway musical
The Sound of Music. The 1965
film adaptation of the musical, starring
Julie Andrews and
Christopher Plummer, was the
highest-grossing film of all-time for five years. The original seven Trapp children were: • Rupert (1911–1992); •
Agathe (1913–2010); •
Maria Franziska (1914–2014); • Werner (1915–2007); • Hedwig (1917–1972); • Johanna (1919–1994); • Martina (1921–1951). The later children were: •
Rosmarie (1929–2022), • Eleonore (1931–2021), •
Johannes (b. 1939). The eldest daughter, Agathe (called "Liesl" in the 1965 film), published her own account of life in the Trapp family in 2003,
Memories Before and After The Sound of Music, which was later itself turned into the film
The von Trapp Family: A Life of Music in 2015.
Later lives Two members of the group died while the group was still active, Georg in 1947 at age 67, and Martina, who died in childbirth in 1951 at age 30. At the time of its cessation in 1957, the group included a number of non-family members and "only Maria's iron will had kept the group together for so long." ==Musical style and repertoire==