The Sound of Music

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II

album cover

There's no getting around The Sound of Music. It's part of the fabric of musical theater, championed as an artistic triumph in some quarters and regarded, no less affectionately, as kitsch in others. (Around the film's fortieth anniversary, there was an outbreak of interactive Rocky Horror Picture Show-style screenings, with audience members in nuns' habits singing along, and talking back to the screen.) Thanks to the song "Do-Re-Mi," lots of school kids effortlessly learn the notes of the major scale. The musical's first section offers a glimpse of prewar European upper-crust family life, while the second act provides a human perspective on the tumultuous events of 1930s Europe. It is corny and touching, bombastic and deliberate, stereotypical and idiosyncratic.

This recording, from the blockbuster film, stayed in the Top 40 of Billboard's Album charts for 161 weeks. Whatever its shortcomings, the final collaboration between composer Richard Rodgers and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II cannot be denied in one respect: Its songs are almost frighteningly memorable, a series of earworms that just won't take no for an answer. Writing melodies to celebrate the power of music is a tricky business at best, but with his opening title Rodgers goes there, boldly. His theme has a majestic and graceful sweep—it's exactly the series of notes you'd expect to burst forth from nature as some idealistic young heroine passes by. Really all of the show's major motifs can be appreciated not just as plot devices but hymns to the glory of music—from the stepwise ascension of "My Favorite Things" (sung primly here by Julie Andrews) to the comic caricatured yodeling of "The Lonely Goatherd," Rodgers and Hammerstein find ways to twist everyday sounds into swirls of wonder.

To appreciate just how strong Sound of Music's individual songs are, seek out a few of the many reinterpretations that followed in the show's wake. Of particular note is John Coltrane's soprano saxophone journey through "My Favorite Things." Recorded while the film soundtrack was still selling like gangbusters, it finds Coltrane and his group reinventing the song, while exhibiting a deep reverence for the musical invention, and the gee-willickers innocence, of Rodgers's original theme.

Genre: Musicals
Released: 1965, RCA
Key Tracks: "The Sound of Music," "Sixteen Going on Seventeen," "Edelweiss," "My Favorite Things"
Another Interpretation: Original Broadway Cast
Next Stop: John Coltrane: My Favorite Things
After That: Sarah Vaughan: In the Land of Hi-Fi
Book Pages: 653–654