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Concept
Georg von Trapp
Summary
Georg Ludwig Ritter von Trapp (4 April 1880 – 30 May 1947) was an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Navy who later became the patriarch of the Trapp Family Singers. Trapp was the most successful Austro-Hungarian submarine commander of World War I, sinking 11 Allied merchant ships totaling 47,653 GRT and two Allied warships displacing a total of 12,641 tons. His first wife Agathe Whitehead died of scarlet fever in 1922, leaving behind seven children. Trapp hired Maria Augusta Kutschera to tutor one of his daughters and married Maria in 1927. When he lost most of his wealth in the Great Depression, the family turned to singing as a way of earning a livelihood. Trapp declined a commission in the German Navy after the Anschluss and settled in the United States.
Trapp's accomplishments during World War I earned him numerous decorations, including the Military Order of Maria Theresa. After his death in 1947, the family home in Stowe, Vermont, became a ski lodge, the Trapp Family Lodge. Maria von Trapp's 1949 memoir The Story of the Trapp Family Singers was adapted into the West German film The Trapp Family (1956), which served as the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music (1959) and the film adaptation directed by Robert Wise (1965).
Georg Ludwig Ritter von Trapp was born in Zara, Dalmatia, then a Crown Land of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Zadar, Croatia). His father, Fregattenkapitän August Johann Trapp, was a naval officer who had been elevated to the Austrian nobility as Ritter von Trapp when he was awarded the Order of the Iron Crown Third Class. Both his sons inherited this hereditary title of Ritter (Knight). August Ritter von Trapp died in 1884, when Georg was four.
Trapp's mother was Hedwig Wepler. His older sister was the Austrian artist Hede von Trapp, and his brother Werner died in 1915 during World War I.
In 1894, aged fourteen, Trapp followed in his father's footsteps and joined the Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Navy, entering the naval academy at Fiume (now Rijeka).
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