Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer in ‘The Sound of Music.’
©1965 20th Century Studios, Inc.
When The Sound of Music came out in 1965, there was simply nothing else like it. Previous musicals may have been splashier, edgier or boasted bigger-name stars, but nearly all of them were filmed inside Hollywood studios. But director Robert Wise, whose West Side Story (1961) featured an impressive amount of location shooting on the streets of New York City, had a grander vision for his cinematic adaptation of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1959 Broadway hit. Wise took stars Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer and the rest of the cast out of the Hollywood backlots and into the Alps, shooting on location in Salzburg, Austria, to give the sweeping songs and story a realistic grandeur.
The film connected in a big way. The Sound of Music won five Academy Awards, became the highest-grossing picture of the year and – thanks to repeat customers – stayed in theaters until 1969. Of course, it wasn’t just location shooting that made it a smash. Those immediately hummable Rodgers & Hammerstein songs went over like raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens when the movie exposed them to an audience beyond Broadway. Testifying to the timelessness of those tunes, The Sound of Music soundtrack would go on to spend 109 weeks in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 — the most of any soundtrack in the chart’s history. In 2015, Billboard ranked it the most successful soundtrack of all time on the chart.
On Friday (Feb. 2), Craft Recordings releases a five-disc Super Deluxe Edition of The Sound of Music soundtrack which features a number of treasures for fans of the film. It boasts 11 never-before-heard tracks, including alternate versions, a demo take and Christopher Plummer’s original vocal performances.
Here are our five favorite things from the new release.
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It’s the Full Soundtrack, Finally
The original RCA Victor edition of The Sound of Music clocked in at about 45 minutes and included all of the beloved Rodgers & Hammerstein show tunes from the blockbuster film. This, however, is the first time that all the music from the film has been released on one set. Now, are you likely to plug arranger Irwin Kostal’s “The Laendler” (which plays during that sexual tension-filled dance between Maria and Captain Von Trapp) into all of your “best musical” playlists? Probably not. But having every note of music from this film in one place is a lovely, long overdue thing.
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We Get to Hear Christopher Plummer’s Vocals
Plummer was famously dismissive of the film, though he grew to embrace its cultural impact near the end of his life. Perhaps figuring into his estrangement from the movie was the fact that unlike co-star Andrews, Plummer’s singing voice was dubbed for the theatrical release. Bill Lee, a Disney vocal veteran, provided Plummer’s vocals for “Edelweiss” and everything else, though audiences at the time didn’t know it.
There’s no real tea (a drink with jam and bread) here: Such things were commonplace at the time — just one year earlier, Audrey Hepburn starred in My Fair Lady without singing a note. Now, decades after the film’s release and three years after his death, we can finally hear the acting legend singing these beloved songs. Plummer’s pipes are actually pretty good – nothing spectacular (you can hear him stretching when he sings “I go to the hills” on “The Sound of Music (Reprise)”) but he’s better than plenty of actors who sang in big-budget musicals this century. They made the right choice dubbing him back in the day — this role demands a vocal knockout, not an amateur — but it’s still a real treat to hear Plummer crooning… and to hear his laughter during “Something Good.”
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Hear Early Versions of Classic Songs
Speaking of vocal dynamos who dubbed for the stars, this expanded edition features ghost vocalist Marni Nixon singing an early demo of “I Have Confidence.” Nixon secretly provided the singing voice for Hepburn in My Fair Lady, Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Deborah Kerr in The King and I. She even appeared onscreen in The Sound of Music as Sister Sophia — she’s the nun who defends Maria, singing, “But her penitence is real” during the convent diss track “Maria.” During the film’s early production days, Nixon helped Rodgers get some of the songs into shape by singing on demos such as this one. Her operatic training is abundantly clear on this demo, and when you compare it to Andrews’ version, you truly appreciate the rambunctious charisma Andrews brought to the song.
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Playing Spot-the-Difference
Of the numerous alternate takes on this edition, none of them are radically different from the film. Still, it’s fun to listen and pick out slight variations in the unused takes. For example, the alternate version of Andrews singing “I Have Confidence” is, well, not quite as confident. Most noticeable is the way she delivers the lyric, “A captain with seven children / What’s so fearsome about that?” In the film, she gives the line a bit of a snap, as if to goad herself into meeting this challenge head-on. It’s a smart, funny delivery, but it’s absent from this alternate version, where the line is delivered sweetly. Hearing these shelved takes provides a fascinating look into how these classic songs took shape — and it makes you realize how sublime the final product turned out.
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Then-Contemporary Interviews
The Super Deluxe Edition includes four audio tracks circa the film’s 1965 release: commentary from Rodgers, plus three separate interviews with Rodgers, Wise and actress Charmian Carr, who played eldest child Liesl von Trapp. Rodgers is drily humorous and rather prescient, predicting (accurately) that despite the success of musicals in the mid-sixties, there was likely to be a fallow period that followed given that Hollywood genres tend to “run in cycles.” Carr’s interview is also a delight – she all but fell into this role-of-a-lifetime. And if you’ve ever wondered where her unusual first name comes from (or how it’s pronounced), well, you’ll just have to listen.