It Was the Last Song Oscar Hammerstein Ever Wrote. Then the Voice the Film Hid for 58 Years Was Finally Heard

In the fall of 1959, The Sound of Music was trying out in Boston before its Broadway opening. Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II felt something was still missing.

Captain von Trapp needed a song of his own. Near the end of the show, at a festival concert, he would have to say goodbye to the Austria he loved, a country now under Nazi control.

The writers also remembered that their Captain on stage, the actor Theodore Bikel, was a folk singer who played the guitar. So the song had to be simple, something a man could sing with a guitar in his hands.

This was one of the very few times in their long partnership that the music came first. Rodgers wrote a gentle waltz, and Hammerstein set words to it about a small white flower that grows high in the Alps: the edelweiss.

Hammerstein was already ill with stomach cancer. “Edelweiss” turned out to be the last song Rodgers and Hammerstein ever wrote together. Hammerstein died in August 1960, nine months after the show opened on Broadway.

The song sounded so much like an old folk tune that people believed it was one. Bikel later wrote about an Austrian man who told him how much he loved “Edelweiss,” adding that he had known it for a long time, “but only in German.” In fact, it was never a folk song, and it has never been Austria’s national anthem. It was written for the theater.

The 1965 film gave the song a new, tender scene. The Captain, a widower, gives in to his children, picks up a guitar for the first time since his wife’s death, and quietly sings “Edelweiss” in the family drawing room. His eldest daughter, Liesl, joins in.

Christopher Plummer, who played the Captain, recorded the song himself. But in the finished film his singing was replaced with the voice of the singer Bill Lee. For decades, audiences never heard Plummer’s version.

Then, in December 2023, almost three years after Plummer died at 91, his original vocal was released on a Super Deluxe Edition of the film’s soundtrack and matched to that very scene.

That is the video above. It is a little less polished than the version most of us grew up with, and somehow even more touching.