Last night, I sat on the wooden bleachers in the elementary school gym where our grandchildren are students. Next to me, our youngest grandson sat on my wife’s lap, and his parents and oldest sister were in front of us. We were there to hear our youngest granddaughter sing in a choral concert.

It was the school’s first public choral concert since the Covid-19 pandemic. I don’t know how they handled concerts before the pandemic, but this year, they are having three short concerts, with a couple of classes singing in each concert. We’ll be back next week when our oldest granddaughter will be singing.

Our granddaughter stood in the middle of the front row of the students. She knew all of the words and sang with enthusiasm. The concert consisted of four songs from the musical “The Sound of Music.” The children enjoyed the music and sang well. I was enjoying myself, too. Part of my enjoyment was watching our grandson, who just turned three. He listened to the songs and clapped with a big smile. The short concert was just the right length for him. Had it been much longer, he might have become bored. I probably wouldn’t have become bored, but a half-hour sitting on wooden bleachers in a school gym was the right amount of time for me, too.

I was pleasantly surprised, however, at how well the students sang. They were accompanied by a pianist and directed by a teacher who was a music specialist who served the elementary school and a middle school in the district. I’ve been to plenty of school music concerts over the years. Too many have involved recorded accompaniments played over a poor PA system. At the same time, the director tried to keep the children together, forced to follow the pace of the accompaniment instead of having an accompanist who could follow the director.

The director addressed the crowd of family members and reported that the children had been learning the songs and the story of the von Trapp family in addition to learning the songs. She reminded the audience that the musical is based on a true story. One of the students told the audience about the edelweiss flower before the chorus sang the song about it.

I know that the time for music instruction is limited in the school, and I doubt there was an opportunity to go into depth with the students. Still, the family's real story seems very relevant to life in the United States today. I doubt that the students had an opportunity to learn the difference between the fictional movie and musical and the real life of the von Trapp family.

In real life, the family didn’t leave Austria by walking over a mountain pass. When the Nazi regime took over Austria, Maria and Georg were already married. They were already established as a traveling music act. They took a train to Italy and from Italy to London, where they traveled to the US by steamship with their musical conductor and a secretary. They entered the US on six-month visas. When those visas expired, they went on a brief Scandinavian tour and were able to re-enter the US on six-month visas a second time. Maria gave birth to her third child during their first visit, bringing the family to ten children.

That means that Johannes, born in Philadelphia, was a citizen of the United States by birthright, a factor that would later help the rest of the family eventually become naturalized citizens. It is impossible to say what would have happened had they not had the means to travel internationally at their own expense or what would have happened had they not had a child born in the US. While the family did enter the US legally both times, their immigration status was questioned for a time as an official Record of Aliens Held for Special Inquiry for the family exists among publicly available documents.

I see a lot of connections between a family fleeing the authoritarian Nazi regime and some of the stories of the children in the school. The school, located just eight miles from the US border, certainly has families who are in the process of determining their immigration status. Some of them are likely trying to deal with visas that expire. Some family members have their documents in order, and some are still getting their immigration status worked out. The attempt at changing birthright citizenship as guaranteed by the US Constitution would have a tangible impact on some of the children in last night’s concert.

A music teacher doesn’t have time to go into the details and tell about why birthright citizenship is essential to many immigrant families. Still, most children understood that the family story involved leaving a beloved homeland because of an authoritarian dictator. The choice of songs for the concert was a good one because the music by Rodgers and Hammerstein is fun to sing and relatively easy to learn. There are just enough rhythmic and interval challenges to give opportunities for teaching basic group singing skills.

As a writer, I appreciate thinking about how Maria von Trapp’s 1949 memoir became a book by Russell Crouse and Howard Lindsay, which later was adapted into a musical from which a movie was made that is still being viewed and still paying royalties to its star Julie Andrews. Interestingly, the family whose story is told didn’t receive much financial compensation. Stories are like that. They gain a life of their own. They have different meanings to different people who read or hear the story. I doubt that many of the people sitting in the school gym last night were making connections between the von Trapp family and the chaos of the current US administration. They probably didn’t ponder the difficult choices faced by Georg von Trapp, a decorated submarine captain during WWI and whose first wife was the daughter of the inventor of the torpedo. He chose not to fly the Nazi flag at his home, refused to have his family sing at a birthday party for Hitler, and refused a commission to the Nazi navy. He was on thin ice with the political situation in Austria when they left their homeland.

The children’s concert reminded me of the power of story and song.