Rosmarie Trapp,who has died aged 93,was the last surviving female member of the original Trapp Family Singers,whose story of musical success and flight from Austria in the late 1930s was the inspiration for the 1959 Broadway musical and multi-Oscar-winning 1965 film,The Sound of Music.
The von Trapps were an aristocratic Austrian family headed by the naval war hero Baron Georg von Trapp and his wife,Agathe. When Agathe died in 1922,the family moved to a villa in the suburbs of Salzburg,and Maria Augusta Kutschera,a young novice nun from a nearby abbey (played in the film by Julie Andrews),was appointed as tutor to the seven von Trapp children.
Rosmarie Trapp,whose family inspired the film The Sound of Music.Trapp family via AP
She became the Baron’s second wife in 1927 and Rosmarie,born on February 8,1929,was the eldest of their three children.
The family’s finances suffered during the Depression,and to make ends meet,the von Trapps turned a family hobby of choral singing into a money-spinner by selling tickets to staged concerts.
After the Anschluss of 1938,Baron von Trapp was offered a commission in the German navy which,being an ardent anti-Nazi,he refused. Instead,he and his family fled the country not,as Hollywood would have it,overnight across the Alps to Switzerland,but by daytime train to Italy,then by sea to America,where they arrived with just $34 and settled in Pennsylvania.
Some of Georg von Trapp’s children,(from left) Maria,Eleonore,Werner,Rosmarie and Agathe sing at a mass in 1997,on the 50th anniversary of his death.AP
There they continued to perform as the Trapp Family Singers (an early poster promised “rollicking folk songs,yodels and mountain calls”). After three years they moved to Stowe,in northern Vermont,and in 1950,after Baron von Trapp’s death,set up the Trapp Family Lodge,a ski lodge where Rosmarie and her older half-sister Maria taught Austrian dance.
In 1951,as Rosmarie Trapp (some other siblings kept the “von”),she became an American citizen.
Like her siblings,she was surprised by the dramatic licence taken by the makers ofThe Sound of Music. “When I saw the movie for the first time,I said:‘Wow! Was this my life?’” Rosmarie told an interviewer in 1995. “It was so much different from what I remember living.”
In contrast to the upbeat story presented in the film,Rosmarie had emotional problems,ran away from home aged 18,and stopped performing on stage. After the release of the film she found the publicity a strain. “I used to think I was a museum,but I can’t escape it,” she said in 1997. “When you’re inThe Sound of Music,you are a museum.”
She “found” herself aged 40 by turning to the Bible,becoming an ordained evangelist with the Community of the Crucified One (“a community of believers,not just a Sunday church”).
The Von Trapps as they were portrayed in The Sound of Music.Corbis/Getty Images
She later worked for five years as a lay missionary and teacher in Papua New Guinea with her half-sister Maria,and volunteered on a kibbutz.
An obituary published in theVermont Biz described her as an “emotionally sensitive” person and drew attention to her “sense of curiosity and wonder[which] led her to explore a variety of projects throughout her life.”
This included organising communal singsongs and knitting circles,owning thrift shops,and teaching people to sing and play the recorder.
Unmarried,she enjoyed the company of her cats and indulged in “the occasional beer”.
In Stowe,she was “famous for walking everywhere”,while “locals marvelled at her pulling her purchases home in a wagon or on a cart,often for a significant distance.”
“The happy ending is:We’re survivors,” she told an interviewer in 1997. “After running away from Hitler,our family survived. We’re still surviving.”
Rosmarie Trapp is survived by her brother Johannes von Trapp,the youngest of the baron’s 10 children.
The Telegraph,London.
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