Thanks to a tweet by Megan Smolenyak, I learned that Agathe Von Trapp, made famous by The Sound of Music, has passed away at the age of 97. According to Miss Von Trapp, the movie missed a lot when it came to the accuracy of the tale. Following is a teaser from an article in the December 29, 2010 edition of the Montreal Gazette.
BALTIMORE – Agathe von Trapp, the eldest daughter of the von Trapp family made famous in “The Sound of Music,” died of congestive heart failure Tuesday at Gilchrist Hospice Care. She was 97 and lived in Brooklandville, Md.
Accounts in The Baltimore Sun said that for the past five decades, after she and her siblings stopped performing as the Trapp Family Singers, she lived a quiet life as “a virtual recluse” in Glyndon, Md. 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.
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“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,” the 2003 Sun story said.
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Agathe von Trapp was born in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. She sang with her siblings until she was 43. 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.
Agathe von Trapp and 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, when they established a private kindergarten on the grounds of Sacred Heart School in Glyndon.
Until their retirement in 1993, Agathe von Trapp and Kane lived on the Sacred Heart grounds. While Kane taught, von Trapp kept house: tracking expenses, leading German music and art lessons, answering phones, supervising on the playground and making snacks.
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Survivors include a brother, Johannes von Trapp; and three sisters, Maria, Eleanor and Rosemarie, all of Vermont.
