The Sound of Music

Plots: A young novice is sent by her convent in 1930s Austria to become a governess to the seven children of a widowed naval officer. In 1930s Austria, a young woman named Maria is failing miserably in her attempts to become a nun. When Navy Captain Georg Von Trapp writes to the abbey asking for a governess that can handle his seven mischievous children, Maria is given the job. His wife is dead, he is often away, and he runs the household as strictly as he does the ships he sails on. The children are unhappy and resentful of the governesses that he keeps hiring and have managed to run each of them off one by one. When Maria arrives, she is initially met with the same hostility, but her kindness, understanding, and sense of fun soon draws the children to her and brings some much-needed joy into all their lives, including the Captain’s. Eventually he and Maria find themselves falling in love, even though he is already engaged to a Baroness named Elsa and Maria is still a postulant. The romance makes them both start questioning the decisions they have made. Their personal conflicts soon become overshadowed, however, by world events. Austria is about to come under Germany’s control, and the Captain may soon find himself drafted into the German Navy and forced to fight against his own country. In 1930s Salzburg, Maria is a novice at a convent, she always having thought about being a nun growing up on the hills above town and being able to see above the convent walls to the goings-on inside when she was a child. The sisters, including the Mother Abbess, however openly muse about Maria’s fitness as a nun, they not questioning her faith but rather her temperament, as she always seems to be getting into one form of trouble or another. As such, the Mother Abbess feels it best, against Maria’s wishes, for her to leave the convent if only temporarily to see if distance will provide some clarity for all of them, Mother able to secure her a position as governess for wealthy widowed Navy Captain Georg Von Trapp’s seven children, age range from sixteen year old Liesl to five year old Gretl. It is a difficult transition for Maria working under the extremely regimented mentality of the Captain who treats his children and her like they were in the military, especially since the passing of their mother, to dealing with the disruptive children who have gone through many governesses in they not wanting a governess but rather love from a present father and a mother. As Maria is able to soften the workings of the household, first with the children and then the Captain, the latter may see what the children need, namely a mother, he having chosen wealthy Vienna-based Baroness Elsa Schraeder. What he is unaware of is that while she wants to be Mrs. Captain Von Trapp and live the life of gaiety and wealth, the Baroness has no want to be a mother to the seven children. Complicating matters are, in no particular order, the Nazi takeover of Austria, the Captain ultra-Nationalistic who has no intention of working within the Nazi regime, and Maria and the Captain falling in love with each other, neither wanting to admit so both because of the Baroness and Maria’s long and singular course of being a nun.