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, and has just begun to appreciate the enormous significance of jazz in America—a country founded by immigrants, slaves, and slave owners, all from foreign lands. His eyes are closed. And I notice how much he’s grown. He’s tall for his age, just over five-ten, and suddenly more man than child. He’s breathing in and out slowly, his dark hair just beginning to show on his face—a slight shadow above his lips and where sideburns will descend. He’s half-Japanese; half whatever I am—a mixture of Irish and German and Dutch. And for the first time I see his ethnicity as a potential target. Will his dark brown hair and dark brown eyes, his Asian-ness, be a source of pride or something he feels he should hide? I realize he’ll feel things I can only imagine.

When the dog bites
When the bee stings

I close my eyes alongside my son and together we listen to Coltrane. I’ve read that he recorded “My Favorite Things”—which he later called his favorite recording—without ever seeing “The Sound of Music,” that someone handed him the sheet music in a Manhattan jazz club one night after a session. “We took it to rehearsal and, just like that, fell right into it,” Coltrane said in a 1961 interview.

But I’ve no doubt Coltrane knew the context of the song—a soothing presence during a time of great fear and moral deliberation. As Jeff MacGregor wrote in Smithsonian Magazine last January, “It’s a timeless song and quite possibly the most American recording in history: composed by the grandsons of German and Russian Jews, about an Austrian family fleeing the Nazis on their way to America, played by an African American genius in a vernacular American style, produced by one Turkish American for a record label owned by another Turkish American. The recording is not in or of the melting pot. It is the melting pot.”

My son and I are connecting without words, in the universal language of America’s greatest art form, jazz, when someone knocks on the car window. It’s a distinguished looking Black man with gray in his beard. He gestures to roll down the window. When I do, he says, “I like your music.” I half expect him to profess his love for Coltrane but instead he tells me my gas cap is open, and I “better see to it.” I thank him and see to it immediately.

My son and I then continue our journey with Coltrane, 34 at the time of the recording; pianist McCoy Tyner, just 21, bassist Steve Davis, 31, and the incomparable Elvin Jones, at 33, on drums. Coltrane sped up Rodgers & Hammerstein’s waltz from 3/4 time to 6/8, and as Trane and Tyner weave in and out of the melody, each with their own cadenzas, my son and I become one with the music, the notes like a swarm of starlings turning in the sky, again and again, separate but one, a murmuration to evade predators, or for the sheer joy of it. My son is tapping his toe, and I see him, ever so slightly, fingering the notes of an invisible trumpet on his right knee.

The gods have given us this day together. Schools are closed due to subzero temperatures. When we return home we watch the 1965 film version of “The Sound of Music,” starring Julie Andrews as Maria and a pitch perfect Christopher Plummer as Captain von Trapp. I’ve been telling my son about the film since breakfast at our favorite greasy spoon, Hamburg Inn No. 2, where I showed him the video of Elon Musk giving what looks to me like two well-rehearsed and flawlessly executed Nazi salutes at Trump’s inaugural celebration. “This was no ordinary victory!” Musk exclaimed. “This was a fork in the road of human civilization!”

My son is visibly shaken by the video. I explain that Musk’s people said it wasn’t a Nazi salute at all, but rather a “Roman salute” given to greet the dawning of a new “Golden Age,” to borrow Trump’s phrase. When historians pointed out that there really is no such thing as a “Roman salute” but what we now call a Nazi salute was first popularized by the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini after his 1925 March on Rome, Musk’s people scrambled for a new explanation. It was, they said, an over-exuberant display of his heart going out to the crowd, and because he has Asperger’s and is on the spectrum, it was also, as the kids say, awkward.

My son says that doesn’t matter. He says “what it looks like” is what matters. Musk, in other words—the billionaire owner of the social media platform X—understands the power of memes and lasting images in the online world, and knew exactly what he was doing. He is, after all, the “world’s richest man” and enthusiastically supports far-right parties in Germany and other European countries. And since the salute he’s turned it into still more memes, shamelessly making light of the Nazi’s genocidal Third Reich and the war criminals who ran it.

Here are just a few:

Don’t say Hess to Nazi accusations!

Some people will Goebbels anything down!

Stop Gőring your enemies!

His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler!

Bet you did nazi that coming

Contrast that with Coltrane’s vision of the world and the power of music to speak to our very souls: “My music is the spiritual expression of what I am—my faith, my knowledge, my being. When you begin to see the possibilities of music, you desire to do something really good for people, to help humanity free itself from its hang-ups.” Coltrane’s recording of “My Favorite Things” was unique in jazz—a critical and commercial success that crossed over to white audiences long before Julie Andrews and so many others—including Tony Bennett’s masterful rendition—turned it into a Christmas classic.

Listen again to Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics:

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I’m feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don’t feel so bad…

Which brings us back to little Gretl’s question: “Mother, would it help if we sang about our favorite things?” Maria’s response, “No darling. This is one time it would not help,” is a dire warning. I think Rodgers and Hammerstein and Coltrane understood the weight of those words, and the tragedy of a family fleeing for their lives because others were afraid to resist—or had joined forces with—the fascists in their midst to preserve their own wealth or standing in society.

Just after Maria answers Gretl’s question, the von Trapp family is discovered in the cemetery by the young delivery boy Rolf, a friend of the family who’s been seduced by Nazi propaganda and joined the fascists. I’d long remembered the power of the scene, but watching it for the first time with my son—who’s not much younger than Rolf—sent a chill down my spine like never before. Rolf holds Captain von Trapp at gunpoint as Maria and the children exit the scene:

Rolf: It’s you we want. Not them.

Captain: Put that down. (Walking slowly toward Rolf.)

Rolf: Not another move, or I’ll shoot!

Captain: You’re only a boy. You don’t really belong to them.

Rolf: Stay where you are.

Captain: Come away with us, before it’s too late.

Rolf: Not another step. Or I’ll kill you.

Captain: You give that to me Rolf. (Slowly reaching for Rolf’s gun.)

Rolf: Did you hear me? I’ll kill you!

Captain: Rolf. (He takes the boy’s gun.) You will never be one of them.

Rolf: Lieutenant! Lieutenant, they're here! They’re here, lieutenant!

As in the Broadway play and the Hollywood film, the real-life von Trapp family successfully escaped Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938 after Captain von Trapp, according to the National Archives, “refused to fly the Nazi flag on their house [and] declined a naval command and a request to sing at Hitler’s birthday party.” What’s lesser known is who took up residence in the von Trapp’s Salzburg home afterward: Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s chief SS officer and architect of the “Final Solution,” the Nazi plan to murder the Jews of Europe. In May 1945, the Allies liberated Salzburg. That same month, Heinrich Himmler was captured and committed suicide.