Maria (1959 song)

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"Maria", sometimes known as How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? is a show tune from the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The Sound of Music.

This song is sung by the nuns at Nomberg Abbey, who are exasperated with Maria for being too frivolous, flighty and frolicsome for the decorous and austere life at the Abbey.

This song gave its title to Andrew Lloyd Webber's reality TV series How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, in which TV viewers voted for a contestant to play the lead role of Maria von Trapp in his London revival of The Sound of Music. Connie Fisher won the TV series and was cast as Maria in the London revival of the show that opened in November 2006 at the London Palladium.

When Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the lyric for this song, he followed the lead from a line in the dialogue that Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse wrote in their script, describing Maria's flighty ways in the Abbey. In particular, he was taken by the detail of her wearing curlers in her hair under her wimple. [1] Hammerstein asked if he could incorporate their dialogue into the song, and they allowed him to do so because "if you tell a story in a song, it's so much better." [2] When writing the lyric, Hammerstein knew he needed adjectives for the nuns to describe Maria. Although he confessed that his vocabulary was never big [3], the final lyric is filled with simple adjectives that reflect his simplicity.

Interestingly, this song has echoes of an earlier Rodgers and Hammerstein song from their 1958 musical Flower Drum Song, the song called The Other Generation. This is because the characters who sing both songs feel exasperated, and because the punchline of the earlier song "What are we going to do about the other generation?" is similar to the punchline of "Maria": "How do you solve a problem like Maria?"

[edit] References

  1. ^ Maslon, Laurence (2006). The Sound of Music Companion. London: Pavilion Books. 
  2. ^ Wilk, Max (2007). The Making of The Sound of Music. New York: Routledge. 
  3. ^ Fordin, Hugh (1995). Getting to Know Him: A Biography of Oscar Hammerstein II. New York: Da Capo Press. 
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