Songfacts®:

• In 1949, J.B. Lippincott of Philadelphia published The Story Of The Trapp Family Singers; this book, by Maria Augusta Von Trapp, was later republished as The Sound Of Music, which is also the title song from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and film.
  
  Austrian orphan Maria Augusta Kutschera was set to become a nun when, in 1926, she was sent to the home of the widowed Baron von Trapp to tutor his daughter, Maria. On November 26, 1927 they married; he was 47, she was 22, and she became stepmother to Maria and her nine siblings.
  
  The Baron made the big mistake of putting all his eggs in one basket, and lost most of his money when his bank failed, and the already musical family became professional singers. In 1938, when Adolf Hitler annexed his native Austria, the staunchly anti-Nazi Baron fled the country with his family, leaving behind everything, and immigrated to the United States.
  
  As if often the case with plays, films and TV dramatizations, a number of alterations were made to the biographical record, but The Sound Of Music is entertainment rather than education. The title song was introduced in the 1959 stage musical by Mary Martin, and sung in the 1965 film by Julie Andrews.
• The stage version of the song has a vocal prelude which does not appear in the film version, the actual filming of which caused Andrews a great deal of difficulty. She was shown singing it on a hillside, a panoramic view which was filmed using a helicopter. In the years to come she would explain many times to sundry TV audiences that the draft from the aircraft would knock her down repeatedly. They ended up doing something like twelve takes. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Alexander Baron - London, England, for above 2
• An unusual use of this song was in the movie Moulin Rouge, where after Ewan McGregor drinks absinthe, he has a strange hallucination where Kylie Minogue appears as a green fairy singing this song. As the vision comes to an end, her eyes turn red and she screams like Ozzy Osbourne - and that really is the voice of Ozzy. The film's director Baz Luhrmann wrote the scene with a more visible part for Ozzy and had him record a full version of the song, but in the end only his scream made the movie.