“The Hills… Are Still” (March 31, 1987)
by Charles Phillip Bissell (1926 -)
11 x 15 in., ink on board
Coppola Collection

The Lowell Sun
Tuesday, March 31, 1987

How do you take the measure of one human life? Or, in the words of a Broadway musical, “How do you catch a cloud and pin it down?”

If it’s the life of Maria von Trapp, you can count the honors, perhaps even the children. But that only quantifies the life; such factors fail to account for the elusive quality that binds all the quantities together.

For Maria Augusta (Kutschera) von Trapp, the 82-year-old matriarch of the famous von Trapp Family Singers, measuring her life falls short of comprehending its meaning. Just as notes on the page are somehow less than their music, so the events and honors of her life are less than that life’s significance.

The widow of Baron Georg von Trapp, who died in 1947, Maria left a Benedictine novitiate to serve as governess for the baron’s seven children. She fell in love, married the widower, become mother to the seven plus three children of their own, and the rest, as they say, is “The Sound of Music.”

When the singing group broke up, the baroness, who preferred to be known simply as Mrs. Trapp, turned the family home on the rolling hills in Stowe, Vt., into a popular resort lodge in 1967. The family chose that corner of New England because it reminded them of home in the Austrian Tyrol. The lodge burned in 1980, but later was rebuilt and reopened by her youngest son.

Maria von Trapp died on March 28, 1987.