Maria Augusta von Trapp (geb. Kutschera)

Maria Augusta Kutschera was born as the legitimate daughter of Carl Kutschera—who worked as a hotel agent and travel courier—and his wife Augusta, née Reiner. Carl Kutschera’s first wife, Clara Rainer, died in childbirth. After her death, Carl Kutschera married his first wife’s younger sister, Augusta Rainer. Maria Augusta Kutschera came from a humble background and was born during a train ride from Tyrol to Vienna. Her mother died a few days after her birth, and she lost her father three years later. She was then raised by her grandmother and a guardian.

After five years of elementary school, Maria Augusta Kutschera attended a high school in Vienna for three years. She then trained to become a teacher and, following a spiritual conversion, joined the Roman Catholic “Bund Neuland.” She worked as a teacher at the convent school of the Benedictine Abbey of Nonnberg in Salzburg and wished to enter the order as a postulant. In 1925, the abbess sent her to serve as a governess for Maria, the convalescing daughter of Georg von Trapp, an Austrian corvette captain known at the time as a war hero who was active as a shipping entrepreneur.

On November 26, 1927, she married the widowed Georg von Trapp and became the stepmother of his seven children: Rupert, Agathe, Maria Franziska, Werner, Hedwig, Johanna, and Martina. Rosmarie was born in 1929, and Eleonore in 1931. Together with the priest Franz Wasner, she helped shape the family choir.

After suffering significant financial losses following the bankruptcy of the Lammer banking house in 1934–35, renting out living quarters and income from the family choir—founded in 1936—became important sources of income. After the von Trapp family won a folk singing competition at the 1936 Salzburg Festival, they were asked to perform on a half-hour radio program, which led to them performing before Austrian Chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg.

"The Trapp Family" made its first appearance as a family choir in the United States on October 21, 1938, at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. Between March 1939 and the summer of 1939, the family toured Europe once more, finally traveling on September 27, 1939—immediately after the outbreak of World War II—on the S.S. Bergensfjord from Oslo to New York, where they arrived on October 7, 1939. In 1942, the family purchased a farm in Stowe, Vermont.

Maria Augusta von Trapp dies at the age of 82 in Morrisville. She is laid to rest next to her husband in the family cemetery in Stowe.

In 1956, the story of the von Trapp family was adapted into a film based loosely on the story. The film was primarily based on Maria Augusta von Trapp’s hugely successful memoir, *The Trapp Family: From the Convent to World Fame* [original title: *The Story of the Trapp Family Singers*].