Dr. Rupert Georg Ritter von Trapp

Rupert Georg Ritter von Trapp was born in Pola [now Pula, Croatia] as the legitimate son of naval officer Georg von Ritter Trapp and his wife Agathe, née Whitehead. During World War I, he lived with his mother and siblings—Agathe, Maria Franziska, Werner, Hedwig, Johanna, and Martina—with his mother’s family in the Zell am See area. In 1922, he lost his mother. Beginning in 1925, the family resided in Salzburg-Aigen. There, the abbess of the Benedictine Abbey of Nonnberg sent Maria Augusta Kutschera to serve as a private tutor to his ailing sister Maria Franziska. On November 26, 1927, Georg Ritter von Trapp married Maria Augusta Kutschera; Rosmarie was born in 1929, and Eleonore in 1931.

Rupert von Trapp attended high school in Innsbruck and graduated in 1929. He then enrolled in medical school at the University of Innsbruck. Together with the priest Franz Wasner, his stepmother shaped the family choir. In the choir, he sang bass and played the recorder.

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 revenue. 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. Rupert von Trapp completed his medical studies at the University of Vermont.

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*].