The Sound of Music

How art and travel can suddenly change the trajectory of our lives

I still remember the moment my life changed. I even remember how warm and humid the air in the theater felt and the salty taste of the popcorn. And then the huge screen lit up, the blue and green mountains came into view, Maria began to sing, and I was mesmerized. It was coming on Christmas, and I was twelve years old.

I started thinking about The Sound of Music today after reading a Substack post from Allan Sutherland, who wrote a lovely piece about the movie that wove the thread of show tunes and jazz and different stages of life around the words to My Favorite Things.

For those of us of a certain age, the movie had a huge impact. In the intervening decades, it has become a cliché. A theater in Portland, Oregon—where I lived as an adult for over 30 years—regularly screened the film as a sing-along event where people could warble along to the songs as loudly and raucously as they liked.

I never attended those screenings, however. Maria/Julie Andrews was my idol, my role model, the epitome of what I longed to be. I loved Julie’s beautiful voice and Maria’s amazing courage, as well as her infectious joy for life.

In contrast to Maria, I was a shy bookworm who memorized dozens of songs and spent hours singing them—alone—to the mountains and skies surrounding the Montana ranch where I grew up. Unlike Maria, I never had the courage to sing my songs for others. No matter how often I practiced Do, Re, Mi, I could not stay on key. I loved singing with others in a group, but was petrified by the thought of performing solo. I just wasn’t good enough.

What I could do was learn to speak German, play The Beautiful Blue Danube on the piano, sing Lippen Schweigen (Lips Are Silent) from the Viennese operetta The Merry Widow, read as much as I could about Austria and Vienna, and imagine what it would be like to live there.

When you think about it, it’s amazing what a powerful effect a movie or a song or a piece of art can have on our lives, isn’t it? How it can suddenly mesh with different pieces of our souls and psyches and transform our thoughts, our imaginations, the very trajectory of our lives.

For example, Steven Spielberg has repeatedly cited David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia as the movie that inspired him to become a filmmaker: “When I first saw Lawrence of Arabia, it was a life-changing experience. The epic scale, the storytelling, the visuals—all of it made me want to make movies. It taught me what cinema could be.”

For Bruce Springsteen, it was hearing Bob Dylan’s song Like a Rolling Stone for the first time: “I was in my car when 'Like a Rolling Stone' came on the radio. It just blasted everything wide open for me. It was like someone kicked open the door to your mind."

For Salvador Dalí, it was Giorgio de Chirico's painting The Song of Love, with its use of dream-like imagery and eerie, surreal landscapes: "It was like a shock to the system. De Chirico's work opened up new possibilities for my own artistic vision."

Travel itself can also spark such transformations, but it is not necessarily guaranteed to do so. Have you ever had the experience of travelling to one or more countries, looking at the sites, visiting the museums, eating the food—and returning home a few pounds heavier but otherwise unchanged?

And then, somehow, the next place you go something just clicks. Perhaps you have an interaction with a stranger that creates a bond between the two of you. Perhaps your heart connects deeply to the landscape, the architecture or the vibration of a place.

This happened to my Austrian husband when he first visited the Dingle Peninsula on the west coast of Ireland. He has always been passionate about the sea, but unfortunately for him Austria is landlocked. So every holiday entailed heading to a seacoast somewhere around the world—from Brazil to South Africa to Mallorca. In 2015, he finally arrived on the west coast of Ireland and suddenly knew it was the place he had been searching for his entire life.

This also happened to my twin sister when she first stepped foot in Rome. Before that, she had spent four months traveling through Spain, France and Greece. She enjoyed her experiences everywhere she went, but when she finally arrived in Rome, she knew she had come home.

My sister ended up living in Rome for 26 years, and my husband and I retired to the west coast of Ireland because this is where his heart is.

As for me, my life took many different roads before the dream of living in Austria came to fruition. I majored in German, spent a year as a student at a university in northern Germany, became a Peace Corps Volunteer in Afghanistan, met and married my first husband there, then returned to the States to raise my family.

It was not until I received a job offer at the age of 63 that my dream of living in Austria finally became a reality. The first few months of getting settled in Vienna were weirdly challenging (I will write about this another time), but I never once considered packing up and going home. Over time, my life began to blossom. I worked with people from around the world, honed my skills and talents, created work I am proud of, and met and married my second husband.

On the downside, as I gradually got to know Austrians, I discovered that many of them strongly dislike The Sound of Music (except for Salzburgians, who have used it to become a tourist trap). They don’t like the figure of Captain von Trapp or pretty much anything else about the movie. And they become really irritated when people from around the world sing Edelweiss to them, thinking it is a beloved Austrian folksong. (It isn’t. It is just a sweet little song composed by Rogers and Hammerstein.)

Despite Austrians’ disapproval and the span of so many decades, Maria/Julie continues to hold a very special place in my heart. However, I did not gain the courage to sing solo in Austria. This did not happen until I moved to County Kerry, Ireland.

What about you?

Has a movie, song, book, piece of art or place had such an effect on you that it changed the trajectory of your life?