[citation needed] When Oscar Hammerstein II wrote the lyric for this song, he followed the lead from a line in the dialogue that Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse wrote in their script, describing Maria's flighty ways in the Abbey.
"[2] When writing the lyric, Hammerstein knew he needed adjectives for the nuns to describe Maria.
He admitted that his vocabulary was never big, but the simple adjectives he used to describe Maria's character proved a success.
[3] This song gave its title to the Andrew Lloyd Webber reality TV series How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?
(2006), in which TV viewers voted for a contestant to play the lead role of Maria von Trapp in his London revival of The Sound of Music.