Climb Ev’ry Mountain

“Climb Ev’ry Mountain” is a show tune from the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music. It is sung at the close of the first act by the Mother Abbess. It is themed as an inspirational piece, to encourage people to take every step toward attaining their dreams. This song shares inspirational overtones with the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel. They are both sung by the female mentor characters in the shows, and are used to give strength to the protagonists in the story, and both are given powerful reprises at the end of their respective shows. As Oscar Hammerstein II was writing the lyrics, it developed its own inspirational overtones along the lines of an earlier Hammerstein song, “There’s a Hill Beyond a Hill”. He felt that the metaphors of climbing mountains and fording streams better fitted Maria’s quest for her spiritual compass. The muse behind the song was Sister Gregory, the head of Drama at Rosary College in Illinois. The letters that she sent to Hammerstein and to Mary Martin, the first Maria von Trapp on Broadway, described the parallels between a nun’s choice for a religious life and the choices that humans must make to find their purpose and direction in life. When she read the manuscript of the lyrics, she confessed that it “drove [her] to the Chapel” because the lyrics conveyed a “yearning that … ordinary souls feel but cannot communicate.The song has often been sung by operatically trained voices in professional stage productions. In the original Broadway production it was sung by Patricia Neway, in the original London production it was sung by Constance Shacklock, and in the original Australian production it was sung by Rosina Raisbeck. In the original stage play, the Mother Abbess sings the song at the end of the first act. When Ernest Lehman wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation, he shifted the scene so that this song would be the first major song of the second act. When Robert Wise and his film crew were filming this scene, Peggy Wood had some reservations about the words, which she felt were too “pretentious.” In addition to that, while Peggy herself was an accomplished singer earlier in her career, the song was simply too difficult for her to perform at that age. As a result, her singing voice is dubbed by Margery MacKay, the wife of composer, music director and pianist Harper MacKay, as Wood was not able to sing the high notes of the song. Rodgers wrote the piece in the key of C, with a modulation towards the end of the piece into the key of D flat, making the last note that the Mother Abbess sings an A flat (Ab5), though in the film it was sung a tone lower. With the popularity of the stage play it would seem Peggy Wood was not alone. Given the range of the piece and the average age of the actor playing Mother Abbess, the oldest character in the story, the song has proven daunting for many actresses over the years. In addition, due to the long instrumental introduction of the song, Wood was repeatedly unable to catch the first word lip synching to McKay’s playback. So they filmed the beginning part of her performance in silhouette against the wall of the set for the Mother Abbess’ office with her back to camera. As director Robert Wise reports, once the vocal had begun, she had no problem matching the performance. Reviewing the dailies later, everybody thought it looked as if the Mother Abbess was receiving divine guidance and so the performance was kept as it was.