Baroness Maria Augusta von Trapp (26 January 1905 – 28 March 1987) was the stepmother and matriarch of the Trapp Family Singers. Her story and that of her family's escape from the Nazis after the Anschluss served as inspiration for the musical The Sound of Music.
Maria Augusta Kutschera was born on a train heading from her parents' village in Tyrol to a hospital in Vienna, Austria. She was an orphan by her seventh birthday. She graduated from the...
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Baroness Maria Augusta von Trapp (26 January 1905 – 28 March 1987) was the stepmother and matriarch of the Trapp Family Singers. Her story and that of her family's escape from the Nazis after the Anschluss served as inspiration for the musical The Sound of Music.
Maria Augusta Kutschera was born on a train heading from her parents' village in Tyrol to a hospital in Vienna, Austria. She was an orphan by her seventh birthday. She graduated from the State Teachers College for Progressive Education in Vienna at age 18, in 1923. She entered Nonnberg Abbey, a Benedictine (Roman Catholic) monastery in Salzburg, intending to become a nun. While still a candidate for the novitiate, she was asked to teach one of the seven children of widowed naval commander Georg Ludwig von Trapp and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp, who had died from scarlet fever.
Maria and Georg were married on 26 November 1927.
Trapp lost his fortune in 1935. Previously, it had been safely invested in a bank in...
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