Thanks for sharing what your experience of these songs was.
I can understand the initial discomfort a person might have about using songs from a musical written in the late 1950s which, while objectively anti-Nazi. does seem to present a watered-down, weirdly romanticized picture of the relationship between ordinary Austrian citizens in pre-Anschloss Austria- if someone who knew nothing else about 1930s European history acted solely on the version of it presented in the film, they would likely link that virtually no one in Austria was in any way supportive of Nazi ideology, that Hitler himself was not Austrian-by-birth, and that the Anschloss was imposed to near-universal Austrian opposition rather than enjoying overwhelming popular support as it did everywhere in Austria other than Vienna, the stronghold of the Austrian Let. That person would also think, if their only knowledge base about that era of European history was what was depicted in the film, that the greatest crime of Naziism was the way it treated Austrian Catholics- seeing this movie, you would hardly know at all that Austria had a large Jewish community, or leftists, or intellectuals, or Roma/Sindhu people, LGBTQ people or Jehovah's witnesses, all of whom would be targeted for extermination by the new pro-Nazi puppet government of Austria and the majority of the Austrian population- well that, and the fact that, thanks to that film, tens of millions of Americans were convinced- and some likely still believe- that "Edelweiss"-which features the last lyrics Oscar Hammerstein completed before his death, btw- is the Austrian national anthem.
There is also the far-less-important but still absurdly amusing facts that the movie left out the fact that
1) Captain Von Trapp was an Italian citizen-by-birth, which meant that he and his family could have left Austria any time that they wanted
2) That when they DID leave, they just took a train out of the country rather than climbing over the Alps with no prior mountaineering training- and WENT BACK TO AUSTRIA at least once after supposedly going into exile;
3) That, if they HAD tried to escape Austria by climbing over the Alps from Salzburg, they would have ended up in Germany.
For all of these reasons, THE SOUND OF MUSIC is rarely if ever shown in Austria.
What John Coltrane did was, whether he meant it or not, a kind of musical repudiation or the worst qualities of THE SOUND OF MUSIC'S songs- songs written in a post-Nazi era, reflecting at some level a push by our country's leaders to whitewash what was done by Germany and Austria, in order to create an artificial and unneeded alliance between the U.S. and ALL "anti-Co,mmunist" states in Europe; to do this by erasing the reality that the vast majority of the German-speaking world had been willing, fully-aware accomplices to genocide.
Coltrane's free-jazz interpretation of "My Favorite Things" created years before the filmed version of THE SOUND OF MUSIC appeared, rejects all of the stifling, morally numb, dismissively cheerful assumptions of 1950s Cold, sincere joy and non-regimentation should be among the "favorite" things of an antifascist world.
