Diane Shepherd Crossover Lyric Soprano's video: My Favourite Things Sound of Music

In the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music, the lyrics to the song are a reference to things Maria loves, such as "whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woollen mittens". These are the things she selects to fill her mind with when times are bad The original Broadway musical places the song in the Mother Abbess's office, just before she sends Maria to Captain von Trapp's villa to become governess to his seven children. However, Ernest Lehman, the screenwriter for the film adaptation, repositioned it so that Maria would sing it with the children during the thunderstorm scene in her bedroom, replacing "The Lonely Goatherd", which had originally been sung at this point. Many stage productions also make this change, shifting "The Lonely Goatherd" to another scene. The first section of the melody has a distinctive property of using only the notes 1, 2, and 5. The song ends with a borrowed line of lyric and notes from Rodgers' earlier composition with Lorenz Hart, "Glad to Be Unhappy", a standard about finding peace in the midst of unrequited love. Using the same two notes for the phrasing of "so sad" in the original song, Rodgers brings the gloom of the song to a similar upbeat ending – "and then I don't feel so bad."