The hills are still alive

By Jonny Dymond
Europe Correspondent

Julie Andrews strides the Salzberg hills in The Sound of Music

Just what is it about The Sound of Music? What inspires such devotion?

What brings coach-loads upon coach-loads of fans from all around the world to make a pilgrimage to the shrines of the film and to lay their eyes upon what Julie Andrew so accurately described as the "green and fragrant land" around them?

It's not the script. In case you weren't paying attention last Easter, the bits between the songs are, how can it be put politely, cardboard thin. The film is woefully paced.

The long opening scene in the abbey cried out for an editor's axe.

The accents wander from New York to cod-middle-European. And Julie Andrews' diction surely deserves a room (maybe a wing) of its own in the British Museum.

It could be the songs. Since refreshing my memory of the film a couple of weeks ago I have sung little else, to the annoyance of nearly everybody. They are now part of me, like a nasty rash, or a particularly ill-chosen piece of clothing.

But if it's just the songs, then why the passion for the place, and why the plan for a museum that briefly stirred up the citizens of one neighbourhood of Salzburg?

The True Fan

There is only one way to find out.

Fresh off the night train from Frankfurt, with rain coming down and a cool wind slicing between the platforms at ten past five in the morning, it wasn't clear that Salzburg was such a good idea.

Kim stands in front of a scale reproduction of the gazebo

But after a refreshing hour and a half's sleep in a local hotel, it was time to join one of the many coach groups that see the sights of The Sound of Music.

Our host (the coach is packed), the fabulously camp Peter, teases us and tests us as the coach gathers speed. The tour takes in such memorable sights as "the front of the house" (oooh) "the lake" (aaaahh) and a scale reproduction of the gazebo. You remember, the gazebo. Swoon.

There was some long explanation of why it was a reproduction rather than the real thing but I missed it, so intent was I on watching the windscreen wipers do their work.

The innocence and the joy that comes through the music, it just touches you. Sound of Music fan Kim

As the coach hisses through the Salzburg rain (just like the rain in the film!) Peter lets slip a not-very-well-kept secret. Austrians don't like the film.

This isn't because of some perverse dislike of high kitsch. Much of Austria is high kitsch, lovingly-preserved high kitsch at that.

It may have something to do with the film's tenuous relationship with the truth.

The bit where the Von Trapps flee the nasty Nazis over the mountains (that are Alive With The Sound of Music)? That particular mountain range would have taken them into Hitler's Germany.

The dreadful songs that the Von Trapp children sing (there's a lot of yodelling)? They did classical, not Austrian-folk-imagined-by-Broadway.

And, in my long and happy years of schnitzel-eating in Austria, I have never been offered it with noodles, despite the happy rhyming with "strudels" in the song "Favourite Things".

Coach-loads of fans make the pilgrimage to Salzburg

None of this bothers the True Fan. Outside the gazebo Kim, from Australia, smiled beatifically. Her newly-wed husband smiled, tolerantly.

"It's the innocence, I think," she said, when pressed as to the film's attraction.

"The innocence and the joy that comes through the music, it just touches you, and the catchy songs..." Her eyes light up. "It just makes you feel so joyful."

And then, with only a little prompting she broke into a rendition of "Do Re Mi".

Puppet von Trapps

I would trudge many alleyways in Salzburg before I was shown the wisdom of those words. Not the ones in 'Do Re Mi', the ones about innocence.

It was in the darkness of the city's puppet theatre that the Light came.

Here, of their own free will, adults sat in the warm gloom and watched up to 10 puppets at any one time act out, albeit in manner even more stilted than the film, a mercifully abridged version of the musical.

Reader, I slept. Just briefly. But when I awoke, to see the puppet von Trapp children gathered on puppet Maria's puppet bed, I thought back to what the theatre's managing director had said, backstage, in amongst the delicately carved and painted marionettes.

"It's a nun who is poor, who is pretty, who is lively, and she fell in love with an officer who is rich and has seven children …" She collapses into giggles collected herself and continues, "So, it's a fairy tale."

It's a fairy tale. How brilliant. And how utterly stupid not to see it.

What could be simpler, or more delightful, or more deserving of a museum, than a fairy tale? It is precisely what is needed in these troubled times, as the days grow darker, and colder, and wetter - The Sound of Music, a drop of golden sun.