I am struck by the similarity of yodeling to the sounds pygmies living in the rainforest of Central Africa make. As they travel through the dense forest, pygmies almost constantly vocalize a high trilling sound that reminded me at the time of yodeling, although it had less of a repeated melody. A European who lived at a forest station where he ran a sawmill described the sound as something that travelled longer distances in the dense forest than speech could. He said, and I was never able to confirm it, that the sounds alerted other groups of pygmies that they were in the area, and signaled to their own group that they were heading in one direction or another.

I found the sound quite alluring, something that was almost not human but clearly not animal either. When I first heard it, I thought I was hearing something caused by wind or water moving through the trees.

Hammerstein’s protege Stephen Sondheim was also able to pull off this magic: in a show like Follies he creates completely convincing pastiches of old music-hall and operetta styles. And in Sweeney Todd he captures Victorian parlor ballads.

I was thinking “older brother” because the movie version of Cabaret came out in 1972 (while I was in college), after The Sound of Music film in 1965 (to which a neighbor of ours very generously took his daughter’s middle-school friends, even though we had to go to the “big city” 30 miles away to see the first-run showing).

The two shows are so different in music and plot, and many other things, that it’s easy to forget they are such near contemporaries.

Wikipedia:

Cabaret is a 1966 musical with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book by Joe Masteroff. The musical was based on John Van Druten’s 1951 play I Am a Camera which was adapted from Goodbye to Berlin (1939), a semi-autobiographical novel by Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood which drew upon his experiences in the poverty-stricken Weimar Republic and his intimate friendship with nineteen-year-old cabaret singer Jean Ross.

Also Wikipedia:

The Sound of Music is a musical with music by Richard Rodgers, lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, and a book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. It is based on the 1949 memoir of Maria von Trapp, The Story of the Trapp Family Singers .. Set in Austria on the eve of the Anschluss in 1938 ..The original Broadway production, starring Mary Martin and Theodore Bikel, opened in 1959 and won five Tony Awards, including Best Musical, out of nine nominations.

The difference in the two stories is actually exemplified by the two songs.

As explained in Steyn’s post, “Edelweiss” is intended to symbolize the pre-Nazi Austria, and appeals to the bonds of patriotism and community in the stage audience (and by extension to the theater-goers).
“Tomorrow Belongs to Me” is self-centered, almost narcissistic, and represents the imposition of the Nazi ideology and state control that supersedes any national feeling outside of the German hegemony, and erases the real bonds of community.

In the same way, the lyrics of the song seem at first to celebrate the beauty of nature, as “Edelweiss” does, but actually repudiates it.

The sun on the meadow is summery warm
The stag in the forest runs free
But gather together to greet the storm
Tomorrow belongs to me

The branch of the linden is leafy and green
The Rhine gives its gold to the sea
But somewhere a glory awaits unseen
Tomorrow belongs to me

The babe in his cradle is closing his eyes
The blossom embraces the bee
But soon, says a whisper
Arise, arise, tomorrow belongs
To me!

I’m actually willing to cut the wokerati a little slack here: they aren’t the only ones who think that particular song is “for real” — although predating Hitler.
(The Nazi connection is to the flower, not the song.)

https://www.steynonline.com/11036/edelweiss
In 1959, the new Rodgers and Hammerstein show was in its out-of-town tryouts.

As usually happened on an R&H show, everything was going smoothly with just a few little peripheral matters to be attended to here and there. But, after watching the show in Boston and with only a week and a half till they moved on to Broadway, Rodgers & Hammerstein felt there was something lacking in the score. The plot of The Sound Of Music is often mocked – captain meets nun in Nazi Austria – but it works if you get the underlying emotions right. Baron von Trapp, whose family has lived on this land for generations, is facing a terrible decision: The Anschluss is transforming his country, and he has no choice but to leave it.

But for that to have any impact on an audience you have to understand that this man loves his native land, and that fleeing it will exact a toll. How to express that? A song obviously. But what kind of song? Theodore Bikel, the actor and folk singer, had been cast in the role, and could certainly relate to the von Trapp experience, because he had lived his own version of it: An Austrian Jew, he had been born in Vienna but his family had escaped, post-Anschluss, to British Palestine. More to the point, he could also strum the guitar. So Dick and Oscar figured they should write a number Baron von Trapp could play live on stage – an “old” Austrian folk song, to be performed in Act Two as part of the Trapp family’s singing act at the Kaltzberg Festival. [the name used in the stage version]

So sixty-two years ago, in a room at the Ritz-Carlton furnished with a piano, the last ever Rodgers & Hammerstein song was written*. As always in this partnership, the words came first:

Edelweiss
Edelweiss
Every morning you greet me
Small and white
Clean and bright
You look happy to meet me…

It’s such a simple idea. But the von Trapps have already decided to flee Austria, and, even if the “audience” at the Kaltzberg Festival and the various bigshot Nazis don’t know that, we – the audience at the play – most certainly do. Today, most writers would hit the thing head on and turn in some Oh-God-I-love-this-land-I’m-gonna-miss-it-why-did-things-have-to-turn-out-like-this? overwrought ululated power ballad. But Hammerstein was a sure enough dramatist to know that, when the captain starts singing about a simple white flower, everyone in the audience would understand how much he loves his country. Edelweiss grows up high, in rocky terrain north of 6,000 feet or so, and it’s long been a symbolic bloom in the Alps. In 1907, Franz Josef made it the official emblem of the Habsburg Empire’s mountain troops, and it remains their insignia in the Austrian army to this day. On the other hand, the Wehrmacht and the SS also made it the official emblem for their mountain troops.

Nonetheless, it took a couple of New Yorkers in a Boston hotel room to wring the full symbolic juice out of the flower. Earlier in the show, Gretl presents a small bouquet of edelweiss to Elsa Schraeder upon her visit to the von Trapp home, and so Hammerstein decided to extend its metaphorical power: Edelweiss is the Austria that will endure and, when the winter of tyranny melts, will flower anew. As always, Hammerstein’s deft, memorable imagery is hopeful: “Blossom of snow/May you bloom and grow…” It’s a small song for a big moment, and Rodgers set it to a wistful waltz tune, simple and folk-like but very affecting.

It went into the show in Boston, and was an instant success. In a production otherwise dominated by its female star, Mary Martin, and a score tailored to her needs, it was Theodore Bikel’s only solo, and audiences loved it:
…
Not long after R&H wrote the song, Theodore Bikel was leaving the theatre when he found a fan and fellow immigrant waiting at the stage door for his autograph: “I love that ‘Edelweiss’,” said the theatregoer. “Of course, I have known it a long time, but only in German.”

Not for the first time, Hammerstein had done too good a job. Just as his “Ol’ Man River” for Show Boat is assumed by many to be an authentic Negro spiritual, so “Edelweiss” is assumed to be an authentic Austrian folk song. Not so. In both cases, a great craftsman manufactured them to solve a structural problem with the storytelling. But he did it so well that they have become for real what they were only intended to simulate.

Some years ago “Edelweiss” was played at the White House, at a state dinner for Austria’s President Kirschschlager, and everyone but the Austrians stood up for the national anthem. Actually, no. The current Austrian anthem is “Land der Berge, Land am Strome”, and the only official anthem by Rodgers & Hammerstein is their title number for their very first show, which serves as the state song of Oklahoma. In a curious example of how the lines between reality and showbusiness blur, among the guests at that White House banquet was the elderly Maria von Trapp – not Julie Andrews, not Mary Martin, but the real Baroness von Trapp.

*There is a sad note to this story: at the time, Oscar Hammerstein II was terminally ill with cancer.

When Hammerstein died, Theodore Bikel was on stage every night on Broadway still singing “Edelweiss”, and he noticed something about the song. “This dying man writing the very last lyric of his career,” he said, “the very last word he wrote was ‘forever’.” But a great song is forever and, almost six decades on, the last bud of the most spectacular partnership in theatre history has bloomed and grown:

Blossom of snow
May you bloom and grow
Bloom and grow forever
Edelweiss
Edelweiss
Bless my homeland forever.

Not exactly to your point, but once an Irish friend explained to me that the traditional movie to watch on television in the UK and Ireland on Christmas Day is…

“The Great Escape.”

Those are two dots I don’t quite connect.

Robert Shotzberger:

I vaguely remember that.

My guess it was partly inspired by “The Man in the High Castle” (2015) mini-series, which had the premise that the Nazis and Japanese won WW II and split the US between them. The show used “Edelweiss” in the opening credits to excellent effect.

The song really sounds like the sensitive younger brother to “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” from the film, “Cabaret.”

I’ve binged through the first three seasons of “High Castle” and now I’m on the final. I’ve seen it before. It holds up.

Zara A:

Lovely memory!

I wasn’t behind the Iron Curtain, but “The Sound of Music” got to me when I was 13.

I’ve watched it three times since as an adult and it still gets to me, but in different ways. I wouldn’t call it a deep film, but it’s got its depths.

I’ll admit I’m a sucker for positive message movies. It’s a shame they don’t make ’em that way no mo’.

(I’m talking about movies that make you feel glad to be alive and human. Not woke crap.)