Maria Franziska von Trapp died on February 18, 2014, in Stowe, Vermont, at the age of 99, the last surviving of the original seven Trapp Family Singer siblings.
Maria Franziska von Trapp died on February 18, 2014, at the age of 99 in Stowe, Vermont, the town that had become the family's American home since the 1940s. She was the last surviving of the seven children born to Georg and Agathe von Trapp who had originally toured internationally as the Trapp Family Singers, and whose story inspired the 1959 Broadway musical and 1965 film The Sound of Music.
By the time of her death, Maria had outlived all her siblings from the first generation of performers, making her passing a significant moment of closure for a family whose story had become woven into global popular culture. She had spent decades after the family's singing career ended working as a Catholic missionary among the indigenous population of New Guinea, before returning to Vermont to help run the family's Trapp Family Lodge, a resort she helped establish and that continues to operate today.
Her death was widely reported internationally, with obituaries noting her direct connection to the real events partially dramatized in The Sound of Music, and highlighting the discrepancies between the fictionalized musical and the family's actual lived history, of which she was one of the last living witnesses. Tributes emphasized her decades of humanitarian missionary work as being, in her own view, a life accomplishment of greater importance than her performing career.