Agathe von Trapp was the eldest of the seven children who became The Sound of Music, and the one who eventually wrote the most honest account of what life at Villa Trapp in Aigen was actually like. She lived to 97 and never stopped correcting the record.
The Story
The family moved to Aigen, a leafy suburb a few kilometres east of Salzburg's historic centre, in 1925, three years after Agathe's mother died of scarlet fever. It was here, at Villa Trapp, that Georg von Trapp raised his seven children and eventually met Maria Kutschera, the governess who would become their stepmother. The family began singing together in the 1930s partly out of financial necessity after the banking collapse of 1935, competing in Salzburg folk-song events and eventually winning the 1936 Salzburg Music Festival competition in the multiple-voice category.
Agathe sang first soprano and helped shape the early repertoire, a mix of Renaissance madrigals, Austrian mountain songs, and folk ballads that later earned them a radio slot in Vienna and a touring career across Europe. When the Anschluss arrived on 12 March 1938, the family left Salzburg that same day, boarding a train at the Hauptbahnhof, Georg's Italian passport providing the legal crossing point into Italy. The escape was nothing like the film's alpine climax. It was a daylight train journey.
She spent the rest of her long life in Stowe, Vermont, where the family bought a farm in 1942 and built what became the Trapp Family Lodge. In her memoir Memories Before and After The Sound of Music, published when she was 90, she wrote about the warmth of real family life in Salzburg, the daily routines, the music, the landscape, and the grief of leaving. It remains the most detailed first-hand account of the Salzburg years from anyone who actually lived them.
