She was a member of the Trapp Family Singers, which toured internationally, though she herself was not depicted in the musical or the film.
Eleonore von Trapp Campbell, the second daughter of Maria von Trapp, whose Austrian family was depicted in the stage musical and the beloved movie “The Sound of Music,” died on Sunday in Northfield, Vt. She was 90.
The death was confirmed by Day Funeral Home in Randolph, Vt.
Ms. Campbell was a younger half sister to the von Trapp children who were depicted in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “The Sound of Music” and its hugely successful 1965 movie adaptation. Both were based loosely on a 1949 autobiographical book by Maria von Trapp, who died in 1987.
“The Sound of Music” tells the story of an Austrian governess (played by Julie Andrews in the film) who marries her employer, a widower (Christopher Plummer in the film), and then teaches his seven children music. The movie won the Academy Award for best picture.
Ms. Campbell’s father, Capt. Georg von Trapp, and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp, had the seven children who were the basis for the singing family. Maria Kutschera married the captain after Agathe von Trapp died.
Georg and Maria von Trapp had three children, who were not depicted in the movie; Ms. Campbell was the second. Early on, she sang soprano as a member of the Trapp Family Singers, who performed in Europe before World War II and, after fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, continued to do so in the United States and internationally.
“The life of singing on tour is one that involves an extraordinary amount of discipline and hard work,” Ms. Campbell’s daughter Elizabeth Peters said, “and my mother lived as a teenager singing lead soprano, night after night after night, and toured much of the year, and it really shaped who she was.”
Ms. Campbell stopped touring in 1954 when she married Hugh David Campbell, a coach and teacher. They lived in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, where she raised seven daughters, teaching them to cook, bake, garden, sew, knit, darn and make butter and ice cream from scratch. In 1975, the family moved to Waitsfield, Vt.
Later in life she traveled to festivals with her instruments and told children about her music career.
Eleonore von Trapp, who went by Lorli, was born on May 14, 1931, in Salzburg, Austria, on the border of Germany. After fleeing the country, her family settled in Vermont in the early 1940s and opened a ski lodge in Stowe, where Ms. Campbell’s two surviving siblings, Johannes and Rosmarie von Trapp, live.
In 1996 the family became engaged in a bitter dispute over money and control of the lodge, a 93-room Austrian-style resort on 2,200 acres. Johannes and several siblings bought out the others in 1995; Ms. Campbell and the rest said their shares were worth more than the price they had received.
“He acts as though I’m the chief instigator, and I’m not,” Ms. Campbell told Vanity Fair in 1998, speaking of her brother. “I’m sad at the situation, which was completely unnecessary.”
In addition to her two siblings and Ms. Peters, Ms. Campbell’s survivors include five other daughters, 18 grandchildren and six great-grandsons.
One daughter, Hope McAndrew, said that while she and her siblings knew every word from “The Sound of Music” as they were growing up, they also knew the songs the Trapp Family Singers had sung on tour long before the musical.
The New York Times contributed reporting.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
