It’s understandable that this lovely little flower would serve as inspiration for a folk song in Austria.
The trouble is… the song is completely Mr. Hammerstein’s invention.
I only recently learned this, so please forgive me if you knew all of this back when The Sound of Music first played or on your first experience with the show. Y’see, “Edelweiss” rings true as a song that could be a national Austrian song… albeit in English. According to the DVD extras, it even fooled Ronald Reagan, who played it for the Austrian president when he came to the White House. (Insert politically charged sniping at Reagan, if you’re so inclined. I’m not. Whatever you think of the man, that song likely had to get through a few levels of approval, and nobody caught it.)
The song has some traits that can easily suggest authenticity. First is the eponymous flower, a protected flower in Austria. The song is a waltz, also easily associated with Austria. The language is slightly archaic and formal, suggesting either age and/or careful deliberation that tends to come with government-related songs. There is a clear invocation for the flower to “bless my homeland forever”, a bit of nationalistic wistfulness. Less subtly, the audience in the show at the climax of the film also knows the song, and sings along with Captain Von Trapp in a defiant nationalist streak even as Hitler’s Third Reich has recently moved into power.
Of course, we are still talking about a musical. Maria sings about her childhood as the good Captain tries to kiss her, and the children she cares for go from musical noobs to singing troupe in an afternoon. The titular “Sound of Music” is pretty clearly a narrative song that also introduces Maria, but the Captain also knows it and joins his children in singing it as he has his conversion moment. The nuns sing. About Maria. Clearly, music is one of the ways the story is told, and it’s not practical to suppose that all of the pieces of music in the show exist outside of the internal needs of a musical.
And yet, “Edelweiss” has a ring of potential authenticity. It’s not impossible for a musical to use “real” music as a way of instilling a bit of truth or history, to invoke reality as a way to give the presentation a bit more emotional heft or literal relevance. In some ways, it’s the theme song of the show, title track notwithstanding, largely because of its assumed authenticity.
So what of games, another entertainment venue? I’ve argued before that creating plausibility and trying to distill authenticity in the lore, presentation and worldbuilding is a lofty but valuable goal. This, of course, assumes that you value believability as a component of immersion. It need not always be, as immersion has many faces, but if you’re angling to make an interesting, believable and entertaining world, it pays off to pay attention to precisely this sort of detail.
You see it in other places, too. Tolkien invented languages, lineages and entire historical epochs for his incredible Lord of the Rings. We may never actually know everything he had rattling around in his head regarding Middle Earth, but his efforts to make his imagination real doubtless had an effect on the books we do have. The infrastructure he built his story on extended beyond the pieces we read about, giving stability and history to the world. Sometimes, history is a key component of telling a story.
We even see a bit of it in the movies at times, say, with the extended version’s Eowyn funeral song or the deep history that brings the Army of the Dead to Aragorn’s side. These are parts of the world that exist outside of the direct scope of the narrative at hand, but still affect it. That sense of a greater world lends emotional heft to a story, and even help suggest that what parts we do witness are also parts of a greater whole, and may yet in turn also become crucial history.
Sometimes it is those small hints that do more to ground a story and suggest the implications of the Hero’s Journey than any grand revelatory exposition from the Jedi Mentor ever could. It could be argued that subtleties aren’t always appreciated in the moment, but I’d note that subtleties are often a hallmark of enduring works. Layers upon layers of understanding are often built on finding interconnections between details, whether those are noted at the time or upon rereading. It’s one of the reasons why rereading scripture often brings new understanding; we (hopefully) learn more in the meantime, and start to see better glimpses of the big picture. That allows us to place information in context, and, as in so many things, context is king.
Mr. Hammerstein put his heart into “Edelweiss”, one of the last songs he would write in this life. It is a slightly melancholic and wistful song, perfectly suited for the emotions the story is meant to invoke. It even carries undertones of farewell, fitting for a family who leaves their motherland under some duress and with a mournful heart.
Music matters. Details matter. We could do worse as we craft our own brand of entertainment than to look to the example of Mr. Hammerstein. We have our own messages and our own tools, but in the end, if we want to craft meaningful compelling experiences, we should understand why these examples endure and why they have the effects they do.
Lovely post, I need to think about that some more.
Meanwhile, an anecdote. My husband spent 3 years working in Munich and has friends there who live in a big house in the foothills of the alps. We went to stay with them, and went for a long walk across Alpine Meadows.
I said, “This is just like in ‘The Sound of Music’” and they were very puzzled. None of them had ever seen it. Or heard of it.
How curious. Now you’ve got me wondering if that’s a side effect of the movie’s anti-Nazi tone or something else. It’s not like it’s an unknown movie; it’s been translated into several languages and was the top grossing movie worldwide for a while.
*cough* That might be a bit of a hasty conclusion here, Tesh. More likely, assuming Spinks talked to her acquaintance in English, it’s a mere translation issue. The movie “The Sound of Music”‘s German title translates back as “My songs – my dreams”. The musical’s title would probably not be translated but also much less well known.
To get back to the main point, details matter indeed. When I started WoW, it was after playing FFXI for two or three years, and the first lasting impression warcraft made on me was when in one of the starter zones, I saw a wolf run to a squirrel, and kill it.
On the technical side, the interesting aspect was that the wolf kills squirrel wasn’t a scripted event, but a fortuitous one – it happened simply when both mobiles had their wandering paths, walked at different paces, intersect.
But beyond that, it conveyed an attention to details that made the world come alive for me, and I was suddenly playing in an universe that appeared to exist for its own sake – a persistent world that was “real” regardless of whether the player was present to witness it or not.
At that time, the contrast between FFXI and WoW couldn’t have been more apparent. FFXI, in terms of a persistent virtual world, transferred a notion of artificiality, a stage that only animates when players are nearby. Through that very simple detail, WoW immediately became a world that seemed alive regardless of the player. It’s such details that make a difference in terms of immersion, at least to me.
[...] his post “Edelweiss“, Tesh discusses how details that may appear insignificant to the player, or merely [...]
Still think it’s side dish, myself. In the end it’s either about how we treat each other (even if just in reinforcement) or it’s just the flickering, mesmerising flames of the camp fire, but with more technology.
And I see Tolkeens works basically about character development, despite how much everyone says he made a world. Yeah, he made a word – and he dropped it on Frodo’s back, atlas style.
I’m certain that a large slab of people who say they like the world and it’s sense of tangibility, wouldn’t have liked it without the really important part of it all – the character development.
Maybe it doesn’t look that way, because it’s like sound and lighting at a show – when it’s being done really well, you don’t notice it.
Definitely important to any game world. You walk into Stormwind and the giant statues that greet you are saying something about a greater history. I think it’s an awe-inducing feeling, and it’s not just because they’re huge, but those statues tell a story–if you delve in, you can learn more about it.
Celerann, I certainly don’t mention the Nazi angle out of any sense of judgement, or suggesting a conclusion, it’s merely a facet that came to mind. The DVD extras note that the Nazi angle was amplified for the show, and more than once, I’ve seen people simply “not speak of it” when something like that comes up. (Like the “trail of tears” and U.S. history, or slavery.) If enough people dismiss such a work for uncomfortable notions like that, it won’t get as much traction in a society where people come at it differently.
…but yeah, that’s probably not the major cause. It’s just something that stuck in my mind having watched those extras.
And yes, the rabbit-hunting wolves were a very nice touch. Little details like that are a nice touch.
Very nice, thought-provoking post. If only MMO’s had that much detail and thought put into their creations, to make their history and lore feel more fact than fiction.
Very nice article! Yes the details do really matter. It’s those small and seemingly unimportant, trivial details that make us fall in love. This is true for much of life
The problem is that in the video game industry adding these kinds of details is considered “polish” which usually is budgeted near the end of a project or “if we get around to it…if we have time etc.”.
Sadly, these wonderful small moments seemed to get bypassed for the heroic elements like cutscenes and complex boss battles.
Blizzard is different in that at least with WoW, they polish as they go. Polish is part of their core philosophy.
By the way, while watching HBO’s Band of Brothers on Blu-ray, there was an episode where they showed a dead German solider with an edelweiss flower pinned on his uniform. One of the American paratroopers remarked that the Germans believed that only a true soldier who endured the long climb up into the alps to find these flowers (above the tree line apparently) was revered and considered a true soldier.
Interestingly enough, that small moment that showed the humanity of the dead German solider in that episode in a strange kind of way helped immerse and hook me into the series. What a powerful little flower indeed.