Agathe von Trapp, the eldest daughter of the von Trapp family made famous in “The Sound of Music,” who took exception to the way her father was portrayed, died of congestive heart failure Tuesday at Gilchrist Hospice Care. She was 97 and lived in Brooklandville.
“She had been rabidly negative about the musical and film,” said her physician, Dr. Janet Horn, who with her husband financed the publication of 3,000 copies of Miss von Trapp’s memoir, which she wrote to set the record straight about her family’s exploits.
Miss von Trapp, who had performed and toured with her siblings as part of the Trapp Family Singers until she was 43, had lived a quiet life in Glyndon for much of the past five decades. She was a kindergarten teacher’s helper at a private Catholic school affiliated with the Sacred Heart Parish for many years, said a friend, Mary Louise Kane, with whom she lived.
“She was a shy, private person, who did not like attention. She was kind and gentle,” Ms. Kane said. “She was patient with children and loved nature. She loved to sing and was a fine artist.”
She said that Miss von Trapp, who was depicted as Liesl in the musical, continued to sing around the house until about three years ago.
Miss von Trapp’s brother Johannes also described her as “very private” and artistic. “She was a talented painter,” he said. “She was 97, but she had a good life. We will miss her.”
Friends said she spoke matter-of-factly and did not care for some of the twists added to her family’s story for the 1959 Broadway musical and 1965 Academy Award-winning film.
She wanted people to know that her father, Capt. Georg von Trapp, a widowed Austrian aristocrat who was played by Christopher Plummer in the film and Theodore Bikel on Broadway, was not cold, unfeeling and distant. She insisted that he was a kind and loving father who helped her and her siblings to sing. She also adored her mother.
“Agathe von Trapp cried when she saw the show at its Broadway opening in 1959. She would have been just as enchanted as the rest of the audience had the characters’ last name been Miller. But this was her family’s name, and it was not her family’s story,” according to an article in The Baltimore Sun in 2003.
Agathe von Trapp was born in a town called Pola in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Born into nobility, she was educated initially by a governess. When Miss von Trapp was 10, her mother died of scarlet fever.
“I first attended school at the age of 11. It was terrifying,” Agathe von Trapp said in a 1987 Sun article. “They made us stand up in front of a big class and talk. I never could get used to it. I was afraid of people then and have never really gotten over it.”
In 1938, when Adolf Hitler annexed Austria, her father, Baron von Trapp, was asked to serve in the German navy. He refused. They were pressed to fly the Nazi flag at their home and to say, “Heil Hitler.” They refused.
By that time the family, including her stepmother, Maria, portrayed by Julie Andrews in the film, had begun singing folk songs and performing in public. They initially gave concerts in Vienna and Salzburg and then toured in Germany, France, Belgium and Scandinavia. They made two trips to the United States, requested asylum and were accepted. She and her siblings appeared in Baltimore in 1944 at the
and in 1949 at the Peabody Conservatory’s concert hall.
While in the musical group, she did not stray far from her stepmother, by then widowed and running the Trapp Family Lodge in Stowe, Vt.
Miss von Trapp and Ms. Kane, who worked at the lodge in the early 1950s, started a private kindergarten in Stowe. In 1958, when the town’s public schools began offering kindergarten, they moved to Maryland, where they established a private kindergarten on the grounds of Sacred Heart School in Glyndon.
Miss von Trapp and Ms. Kane lived on the Sacred Heart grounds. While Ms. Kane taught, Miss von Trapp kept house — tracking expenses, leading German music and art lessons, answering phones, supervising on the playground and making snacks. She also exhibited her watercolors.
For a while, Miss von Trapp went by “Miss Trapp,” dropping the “von” in an attempt to fend off questions about whether she was part of the family. When asked, she sometimes said no.
The 2003 Sun article said Miss von Trapp “was 43 before she stopped relying on someone older and wiser and went to the grocery store and the bank herself.”
The article noted that in the movie that broke box-office records, she came out of her shell at “16 going on 17,” but the reality of her life was different.
“It’s very strange for me; I’ve been living a very quiet life. All of a sudden, these people want to see me,” she said at the time she published her autobiography, in which she sought to differentiate between fact and fiction in the Broadway libretto and screenplay.
Among other liberties, the children’s first names and sexes had been changed. In real life, Agathe von Trapp had an elder brother, but in the musical the eldest child was a girl, Liesl.
As the eldest daughter, Agathe von Trapp had assumed that was her. But as a teen, she had never had a boyfriend, much less a telegram-delivering Nazi.
“In those days, people didn’t date like they do here, and teenage boys didn’t deliver telegrams,” she explained in 2003.
Miss von Trapp said the nun (played on Broadway by Mary Martin) who became her stepmother was not a governess. She was a tutor for one of the von Trapp sisters, who was too weak from scarlet fever to make the 45-minute trek to school. And the children were quite well-versed in music by the time they met Maria, who went by the nickname Gustl.
Miss von Trapp said the family did not cross the Alps to escape Austria. They crossed the street and boarded a train.
In the 2003 interview, she said she “could have lived with” all of the inaccuracies “had it not been for the musical’s portrayal of her father.” She insisted that “he was nothing of the sort.”
In the 1980s, she began writing her memoir. She went twice to Europe to dig through archives for the genealogy completed in 2000. She had saved a box of family pictures and numerous theatrical programs.
“At some point, she began to think of writing for a broader audience. But she wasn’t sure she could write well enough,” the 2003 Sun article said, adding that English wasn’t her first language and she was dyslexic.
She received encouragement from Dr. Horn and her husband, Alan Yuspeh.
“She took great joy in the book and in public appearances and signings she did, although she had been quite reserved and never sought visibility,” said Mr. Yuspeh, who lives in Mount Washington.
Dozens of Agathe von Trapp’s hand-drawn maps, portraits and illustrations from the past half-century are included in her book, which is 211 pages plus a section with family photographs. “Agathe von Trapp: Memories Before and After The Sound of Music,” is dedicated to her father.
“She was remarkable,” said Dr. Horn. “She believed you really need to accomplish something every day. Even if it was to start drawing or painting, she always had a project. She had an extraordinary memory and in many ways lived in the genteel, civilized Old World.”
Plans for a memorial service at Sacred Heart Church in Glyndon are incomplete.
In addition to her brother, survivors include three sisters, Maria von Trapp, Elenore von Trapp Campbell and Rosmarie von Trapp, all of Vermont.
Baltimore Sun reporter Jessica Anderson contributed to this article.
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