Aesthetic
Realism seminar:
What's
More Important:
to Appreciate Rightly or Be Praised?, part 2
By Lynette Abel
The Meaning
of Honest Appreciation
and The Sound of Music
Rodgers' and Hammerstein's The Sound of Music,
released as a film in 1965, starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer,
has been popular all these years. I think the large reason it has
affected people is because of what it says about the meaning of appreciation,
and also about fascism. Fascism, I learned from Aesthetic Realism,
begins with that in a person which says, "my job is not to appreciate the
world but to have other people kowtow to me, make me the most important
thing, while I can treat them anyway I want." Mr. Siegel described
it as the ego made iron. This ordinary contempt, taken further and
nationalized, led to the extermination of millions of human beings in Nazi
Germany.
The film, adapted
from the book The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, is based on
the life of Maria Kutschera Trapp and takes place in Austria at the time
of the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of that country in 1938 just prior
to WWII. The plot, in outline, is as follows: Mother Abbess of the
Nonnberg Abbey has arranged for Maria, a young Catholic postulant who seems
discontented at the convent, to take a post for a time as governess for
the seven children of a retired Austrian Navy Officer, a widower, Captain
Georg von Trapp. In time the Captain and Maria fall in love and are
married. But then he is ordered to serve as an officer in the Third
Reich, something utterly abhorrent to him; so the family, with only a few
possessions, risk their lives as they flee on foot over the mountains to
Italy.
In his definition
of Appreciation from Definitions and Comment, Being a Description of
the World, Mr. Siegel writes:
"The general trend of unconscious
and conscious appreciation is from narrowness of the self to grandeur,
from skimpiness to multiplicity. The trend is towards Existence or
the Universe itself.
I think these sentences describe why the
opening scene is so moving. It begins in silence with a sight of
the majestic Austrian Alps on a late summer afternoon, amid green valleys
and blue lakes--we get a sense of wide existence. Then we see one
self--Maria, stretching out her arms--swept by the vastness and beauty
that surround her. As we’ll see, Maria is in a struggle. She
hopes to care for something large, but is dissatisfied with herself in
the Abbey; there is a kind of order that she feels restricted by.
I think Maria stands for the desperate desire in people to get out of our
confined, narrow selves and to appreciate the universe rightly. She
wants to put opposites together in herself--opposites Aesthetic Realism
shows make for beauty in art, and in the art of music--narrow and wide,
freedom and precision, the limited and boundless.
As Maria sings the
title song, we are moved, because technically it puts together these very
opposites. In talking with my colleague, the composer, Edward Green,
I learned that the reason that first phrase sounds so expansive is the
words "The hills" go out from the dominant, the 5th note of the scale which
has a sense of boundary, up to the 6th note of the scale, which is the
interval that most has the feeling of openness. This is The Sound
of Music sung by Julie Andrews. [Music]
When Maria first
arrives at the home of Captain von Trapp, she learns she is the 12th governess
his children have had since their mother died two years earlier.
Their father has run the house in a military fashion--using whistles, giving
orders, and Maria is instructed to drill the children in their studies
and to adhere to strict discipline. Meanwhile, the children have
gotten a triumph seeing how fast they can get rid of each of their governesses.
Liesl asserts: "I don't need a governess!" Brigitta states "Your dress
is the ugliest dress I ever saw," And one of the children puts a
live, wriggling toad in Maria's pocket. Maria is shaken, but she
also believes there is something better in the children than what they
have shown, and they are hurting themselves being so scornful.
Maria also feels
the children's lives are too regimented and she encourages them to appreciate
new things. When the Captain goes to Vienna to visit his fiancée,
Baroness Elsa Shraeder, she takes the children on bike trips throughout
Salzburg; they hike into the mountains, where they picnic, roll on the
grass, climb trees, and Maria, thinking about what will encourage the Baroness
and the Captain when they return, teaches the children how to sing.
And they become much happier.
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