When the film version of the 1959 Broadway musical
The Sound of Music
, the final collaboration between
Richard Rodgers
and
Oscar Hammerstein II
, opened in March 1965, it became the highest grossing movie in history up to that time and went on to win the Academy award for best picture. The accompanying soundtrack did not do as well, probably because many households already possessed copies of the massively successful original Broadway cast album. But it did manage to hit number one and spend four-and-a-half years on the charts. (As of 2000,
RCA
was claiming North American sales of 11 million copies, though the album had never been certified beyond the gold level.) It was a very different recording from the Broadway LP. The main difference, of course, was the substitution of
Julie Andrews
for
Mary Martin
in the starring role of Maria, the postulant who leaves an Austrian convent to marry a wealthy naval captain with seven children.
Martin
, at whose behest the show was written, was a 45-year-old Broadway veteran when she started to play Maria, a real person who had been 21 when the events depicted in the show began.
relied on her considerable charm to mask the age difference. But she had displayed little interest in film during her career, and could hardly have been cast in the movie version after the age of 50 in any case.
Andrews
, though also a Broadway veteran, having starred in
My Fair Lady
(and, ironically, been passed over for the film version) among other shows, was only in her late 20s. Fresh from her Academy award-winning appearance in the title role of
Mary Poppins
, she was well-placed to play another children's nanny and proved to be superb in the film as well as on the soundtrack album (though performances gauged for the screen sometimes came off as overly exuberant on record, particularly
"Do-Re-Mi"
).
Irwin Kostal
's arrangements were much more ornate than those of
Robert Russell Bennett
for the Broadway show. The film version eliminated songs as
"How Can Love Survive?"
"No Way to Stop It"
that had been performed by supporting characters; also, the duet
"An Ordinary Couple"
was gone, replaced by
"Something Good."
(
Hammerstein
had died, and
Rodgers
supplied his own lyrics to this new song and to
"I Have Confidence,"
which
put across winningly.) Popular as the film may have been, the soundtrack album was worth owning primarily because of
, and the original Broadway cast album remained definitive. Since no edition of the album accurately credits the singers, it should be noted that
Bill Lee
's singing voice has been dubbed in for
Christopher Plummer
, who plays the romantic lead Captain von Trapp, and that it is
Margery McKay
who is singing, not the screen actress
Peggy Wood
, as Mother Abbess on
"Climb Ev'ry Mountain."
~ William Ruhlmann