Perhaps his greatest contribution to music lay in bringing to life the operas of his close colleague Richard Strauss. Böhm led the premieres of Strauss's late works Die schweigsame Frau (1935) and Daphne (1938), of which he is the dedicatee, recorded all of the major operas (often making cuts to the scores), and regularly revived Strauss's operas with strong casts during his tenures in Vienna and Dresden, as well as at the Salzburg Festival.
Böhm was praised for his rhythmically robust interpretations of the operas and symphonies of Mozart, and in the 1960s he was entrusted with recording a full cycle of the symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonic. Böhm's brisk and plain way with Wagner won adherents, as did his readings of the symphonies of Brahms, Bruckner and Schubert. His 1971 recorded cycle of Beethoven's symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic likewise drew high regard. On a less common front, Böhm championed and made recordings of Alban Berg's operas Wozzeck and Lulu before they gained a position in the repertory.
He received numerous honours, among them first Austrian Generalmusikdirektor in 1964. He was widely feted on his 80th birthday, ten years later; his colleague Herbert von Karajan presented him with a clock to mark that occasion.
Böhm died in Salzburg. Actor Karlheinz Böhm, the conductor's son, is known for his role as Ludwig van Beethoven in the Walt Disney film The Magnificent Rebel; the young Emperor Franz Joseph in the three Sissi movies; and for playing Jacob Grimm opposite Laurence Harvey's Wilhelm Grimm, in the 1962 MGM-Cinerama spectacular The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.
Nazi era
Alhough suspected by some of being an early sympathizer of the Nazi party, Böhm never became a member.
According to Norman Lebrecht, in November 1923 Böhm stopped a rehearsal in the Munich opera house in order, reportedly, to watch Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch.[2] In 1930 he is said to have become angry when his wife was accused by Nazi brownshirts of being Jewish during the premiere of Arnold Schoenberg's opera Von heute auf morgen and to have stated that he would "tell Hitler about this".[2] In the wake of the Nazi annexation of Austria he gave the Hitler salute during a concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, ironically violating Nazi rules about places where the greeting was appropriate.[2] After the referendum controlled by the Nazis to justify the annexation, or Anschluss, the conductor allegedly declared that "anyone who does not approve this act of our Führer with a hundred-per-cent YES does not deserve to bear the honourable name of a German!"[2] (It should be noted that Lebrecht, in making these charges, fails to provide documentary evidence for them.)
While music director in Dresden he "poured forth rhetoric glorifying the Nazi regime and its cultural aims".[3] In 1939 he contributed to the Newspapers of the Comradeship of German Artists special congratulatory edition on the occasion of Hitler's 50th birthday. "The path of today's music in the sphere of symphonic works ... has been marked and paved by the ideology of National Socialism..." [4] On the other hand, Böhm's programming of modern works disliked by the Nazis, and his collaborations with anti-Nazi directors and designers "could have been interpreted by enemies of the Nazi regime as a brave attempt to preserve the principle of artistic freedom"[5], and Böhm, apparently preparing for eventual flight and exile, sent his son Karlheinz to Switzerland.[6]
In the end, according to historian Michael H. Kater, Böhm belongs in that group of artists of whom "we also find conflicting elements of resistance, accommodation, and service to the regime, so that in the end they cannot be definitively painted as either Nazis or non-Nazis."[7]
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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Requiem - (English Subtitles) - Karl Bohm Part 1
