When the Dog Bites

“My Favorite Things” and the rebirth of fascism.

Christopher Plummer plays Captain von Trapp in “The Sound of Music” (1965).

By Michael Judge

There’s a scene—and song—in “The Sound of Music” I can’t get out of my head. It’s near the end of the film when the von Trapp family is trapped in Salzburg’s St. Peter’s Cemetery, hiding behind gravestones from the Nazis.

Gretl, at 5, the youngest of the von Trapp children, asks Maria, “Mother, would it help if we sang about our favorite things?” Maria responds gently, “No darling. This is one time it would not help. You must be very quiet. Hold tight to me.”

The song is “My Favorite Things.” And I’m listening to it at full volume in the parking lot of a Walmart with my son who’s just turned 13. Not the original Rodgers & Hammerstein show tune with lyrics, but the 1961 John Coltrane version: Trane’s birdlike soprano weaving the familiar melody into a meditation that turns to rapture—a whirling dervish, a prayer, an ecstatic lament.

My son is listening intently. He plays the trumpet, reads music, a…