STM Reflection

 

Chapel Memories: An Encounter with the Real Maria Von Trapp

Tom Heckt_Rosmarie TrappSix years after the immortal 1959 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music made its debut, I was accepted into a doctoral program at Yale to study music history. It was 1965. As fate would have it, Rosmarie Trapp, the first-born daughter of Captain Georg von Trapp and Maria Augusta, came to Yale soon thereafter to pursue a nursing certification at Yale New Haven Hospital. Being a Catholic, she began to frequent the Catholic Chapel at Yale, More House, where I was engaged as a guitarist for the folk Masses.

Rosmarie, known to her family and friends as Ili (the diminutive ending of Rosmarili), was already in her thirties when she came to More House with her recorder in hand. She was a competent sight reader, willing to help us learn new tunes like Cumbaya and Blowing in the Wind, which were becoming fashionable at the time.

In the fall of 1967, Rosmarie invited me to come to the Trapp family home in Stowe, Vermont, for Christmas to help arrange and accompany Christmas music for the few members of the clan who were still around. There would be about a half dozen Trapps in all. I gladly accepted!

On a snowy December evening we arrived at the lodge, Ili with her recorder and me with my guitar, some pencils and a sheaf of staff paper. The lodge was tastefully decorated in the Austrian manner with lots of aromatic evergreens. During that pre-Christmas week, I busied myself with arranging music and getting to know the other members of the family. Meeting their mother Maria – the real Maria – was something I will never forget.

On Christmas Eve, Maria asked me to accompany her with my guitar on a favorite German carol during midnight Mass. It was her custom after communion to sing this lullaby in German to the newborn Jesus.  The song was called Still, Still, Still. It was gorgeous! There was not a dry eye in the Chapel after she sang it.  It's a charming carol that never loses its magic.