Based on a true story (ish)

Oh, Captain Von Trapp. Look at you with your whistle and your stern authoritarian ways, your children who just need love and music and a singing nun! And later you will also need a secret crafty plan to escape from the Nazis. Oh the drama!

Over the Christmas period, with ‘Do-Re-Mi’ and ‘Sixteen Going On Seventeen’ and ‘Something Good’ echoing in my head as The Sound of Music turned up on various channels, I went a-looking at the historical accuracy, or rather inaccuracy, of the film. I’d always had a vague sense that it had probably been amped up a little bit from the tale of the Von Trapp Family Singers, but I hadn’t quite realised:

Maria didn’t really love the Captain!
They went into singing for cash!

You can’t get to Switzerland that way!

Next thing you’ll be telling me Christopher Plummer has sometimes said rather grouchy things about his role in the fi – oh, wait.

The thing is, even very cool stories need things tightened up and twisted and improved for the purposes of story. It works better if the Captain is super-strict rather than just a normal father, if he’s rich and distant instead of struggling financially; it works better if Maria connects with all the children rather than just one; it works better if they’re just married at the time of the Anschluss; it works better if they perform a rousing super-Austrian song in front of an audience and then sneakily escape over the mountains rather than hop on a train in broad daylight.

When you’re creating a story, even if it’s based on real-life stuff, you need to think about what works better instead of what really happened. If the story of a singing ‘n’ dancing family, with an almost-nun as the maternal figure, emigrating to America to avoid the Nazi regime, needs some tweaking, it is probably safe to say most real-life events might benefit from that ‘artistic license’ thing.