Georg Ludwig Ritter von Trapp was an Austro-Hungarian naval officer who later acquired U.S. citizenship. He was the patriarch of the Trapp Family Singers, whose lives were the inspiration for the musical play and movie The Sound of Music. His naval exploits during World War I earned him numerous decorations, including the Military Order of Maria Theresa. The family came under increasing threats of persecution from the Nazis after the Anschluss when Trapp refused to serve in the German Navy.
About Georg von Trapp in brief
Georg Ludwig Ritter von Trapp was an Austro-Hungarian naval officer who later acquired U.S. citizenship. He was the patriarch of the Trapp Family Singers, whose lives were the inspiration for the musical play and movie The Sound of Music. His naval exploits during World War I earned him numerous decorations, including the Military Order of Maria Theresa. The family came under increasing threats of persecution from the Nazis after the Anschluss when Trapp refused to serve in the German Navy, due to his opposition to Nazi ideology. Trapp fled with his family to Italy and later to the United States, where he set up a farm and lived until his death in 1947. He died of a heart attack at the age of 89 in San Francisco in 1969. He is buried in the Ritter-von Trapp Cemetery in Zara, Dalmatia, where his wife and seven children are buried. He also had a son, Werner, who was also a naval officer, and a daughter, Hede, who died in World War II. The Trapp family Singers were the subject of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Broadway stage musical The Sound Of Music in 1959, which was produced and directed by Robert Wise into a popular movie in 1965.
In the musical, Trapp plays the violin and sings with his wife, Agatha Whitehead, and his daughter, Maria Augusta Kutschera, as well as his son-in-law, Peter Trapp. The children were trained to perform at various events, as a way of earning a livelihood, and Trapp later trained them to play the piano and to sing in front of crowds. The group sang at the opening of the New York World’s Fair in New York City in 1964, and later at the Winter Olympics in Paris in 1964. They also performed at the Summer Olympics in Helsinki in 1968, where they were invited to perform by the President of the United Nations. They were the first members of the family to take part in the opening ceremony of the Summer Games in Montreal, Canada, in 1968. In 1968, the group performed in a concert at the White House, where Trapp received the Presidential Medal of Honor for his services to the Austrian Navy. In 1969, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal for his part in sinking 13 Allied ships during the First World War. He later became the first submarine commander to execute the first nighttime attack on a vessel in the Mediterranean.
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