When The Sound of Music came out in 1965, there was simply nothing else like it. Previous musicals may have been splashier, edgier or boasted bigger-name stars, but nearly all of them were filmed inside Hollywood studios. But director Robert Wise, whose West Side Story (1961) featured an impressive amount of location shooting on the streets of New York City, had a grander vision for his cinematic adaptation of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s 1959 Broadway hit. Wise took stars Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer and the rest of the cast out of the Hollywood backlots and into the Alps, shooting on location in Salzburg, Austria, to give the sweeping songs and story a realistic grandeur.
The film connected in a big way. The Sound of Music won five Academy Awards, became the highest-grossing picture of the year and – thanks to repeat customers – stayed in theaters until 1969. Of course, it wasn’t just location shooting that made it a smash. Those immediately hummable Rodgers & Hammerstein songs went over like raindrops on roses or whiskers on kittens when the movie exposed them to an audience beyond Broadway. Testifying to the timelessness of those tunes, The Sound of Music soundtrack would go on to spend 109 weeks in the top 10 of the Billboard 200 — the most of any soundtrack in the chart’s history. In 2015, Billboard ranked it the most successful soundtrack of all time on the chart.
On Friday (Feb. 2), Craft Recordings releases a five-disc Super Deluxe Edition of The Sound of Music soundtrack which features a number of treasures for fans of the film. It boasts 11 never-before-heard tracks, including alternate versions, a demo take and Christopher Plummer’s original vocal performances.
Here are our five favorite things from the new release.
