Hills are alive with sound of guilty silence

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The Independent
The Sound of Music is to be staged for the first time in the country where the real-life events happened. Peter Popham explains Austria's sensitivity about its Nazi past
26 February 2005


The Nazis will take over a Viennese theatre tonight. An enormous swastika will drop from the flies, a squad of armed soldiers in Nazi uniforms will burst into the auditorium, sirens, whistles, furious orders will ring around the chandeliered ceiling. And as the audience nervously titters, stormtroopers with dogs will fan out in search of those daring to evade them, namely a warbling Austrian family with an inordinate number of children.

Yes, The Sound of Music is in town. It is the first full production of the musical to be staged in Austria. And that is curious, because the musical is actually set in Austria, in the city of Salzburg. All the characters in the play are supposed to be Austrian. The whole look of the film, from the introductory aerial view of Salzburg to the final dramatic escape over the mountains, is a paean of praise to the Austrian landscape. The historical event around which it revolves is the Anschluss of 1938, in which Nazi Germany swallowed Austria whole.

And yet for all these years the Austrians have wanted nothing to do with The Sound of Music. Curious. They could not keep it out altogether, of course. Sound of Music tours of Salzburg have been an important source of tourist dollars for many years. Everyone in Austria has probably heard of the play. They know it is popular abroad and they know roughly what it is about. But it has never been staged before, and the film has never been screened in Austrian cinemas. It has been shown once, and once only, in the mid-1990s, on state television.

But this year the new director of Vienna's state-owned Volksoper, Rudolf Berger, has made it the highlight of the present season. He has cast a well-known local pop star, Sandra Pires, in the Julie Andrews role and splashed large posters of her strumming her guitar across the building's facade. "We've sold 20,000 seats in advance, 80 per cent of seats for the run, which is terrific," he said. "There's huge curiosity about it, everyone's talking about it." Yet others say that is not true. "No word has got around about it all," said Bethany Bell, whose story on the BBC's website this week was the first information on the show to reach the outside world. "It's funny, I haven't heard anything about it," said another foreign journalist in town. It is still a subject, it appears, many would prefer to avoid. And it is not hard to pinpoint why.

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