The Sound of Music flopped in Salzburg. That is the fact the museum is built around, and it is a more interesting fact than anything in the souvenir shops. When the film premiered in 1965, it ran for a couple of weeks and disappeared. Most Austrians — and most Germans — still have not seen it. A five-time Oscar winner, starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer, based on a story from their own city, about a family from their own back yard: unseen for sixty years. That gap is the subject here, and it is a more honest subject than the do-re-mi singalong the gift shops sell. The reason for the cold shoulder is not reducible to embarrassment, though embarrassment is part of it. Co-curator Matthias Bergsmann makes the point carefully: the wounds were too fresh, the coming-to-terms barely begun. Helmut Zoufall, a native Salzburger who watched the crew film at Nonnberg abbey as a young man, puts it plainer: people were starving and didn't want to be reminded. The film arrived in a city still economically and morally gutted by the Nazi period, and it arrived with Hollywood's signature move — collapsing landmarks, scrambling geography, having the von Trapps flee on foot to Switzerland when they actually left for South Tyrol by train. Salzburgers noticed. They have been noticing for sixty years. The museum is housed in the coach house and hunting lodge of the 17th-century Hellbrunn Palace, whose grounds appear in the 'I Have Confidence' scene. The glass gazebo that inspired the Sixteen Going on Seventeen set is here too — or rather, the real one is outside and access has been restricted after too many visitors danced in it and caused damage. Inside, a reconstruction runs the 'Do-Re-Mi' scenes on loop and invites visitors to sing along. This is the tension the museum lives in: it cannot survive without the tourism, but it is trying to say something truer than the tour buses have been saying for forty years. What it says, at its best, is that beneath the kitsch is a film about resistance. Georg von Trapp ripping a Nazi flag in half became a go-to gif for opponents of the far right; social media has recently ignited interest in the film among younger audiences in southeast Asia. The museum takes this seriously. A section on the von Trapps' real story — the one that irked the family when they saw Hollywood's version — sits alongside original costumes, film posters, Georg's naval uniform complete with sabre, a winter dirndl worn by the real Maria, and a journal from the family's flight to the US. Elisabeth von Trapp, Georg's granddaughter, who divides her time between Vermont and Salzburg, is grateful: 'I just hope this museum will help say, look, this family was from your own back yard.' The €4.6m building work and €1.8m exhibition budget came from public funds, which is itself a statement. Salzburg is institutionally acknowledging, after six decades, that this film belongs to it — not just to the 300,000 annual visitors who come primarily for its associations with the movie, a figure that roughly matches the draw of native son Mozart. Whether local Salzburgers actually show up is the open question. In the days after opening, the museum was packed with international visitors and a few locals. One of the locals, Margarete Zoufall, 73, laughed recounting the Americans in the 1970s who came into a record shop asking for the Austrian national anthem, believing it was 'Edelweiss.' The gap between what the film means abroad and what it means at home remains wide. This museum is the first serious attempt to close it. The nearly three-hour film was rarely shown on Austrian television until a special screening last Christmas for the 60th anniversary. The dubbed version, titled Meine Lieder – meine Träume, remains obscure in Germany too. That is an almost surreal fact: one of the most-watched films in the history of cinema, essentially invisible in the country where it is set, for six decades. Dutch child psychotherapist Weeke von der Kooi, 66, who visited the museum, said she loved the film for its romance and hope but never knew it was based on a true story. With right-wing extremism rising again, she said, it feels like history repeating. The museum does not say this explicitly. It does not need to. The flag-tearing gif already says it.
