Karl August Leopold Böhm (August 28, 1894 August 14, 1981) was an Austrian conductor.

Biography

Born in Graz, Austria, Böhm studied law and earned a doctorate on this subject. He later studied music at the Graz Conservatory. On the recommendation of Karl Muck, Bruno Walter engaged him at Munich's Bavarian State Opera in 1921. Darmstadt (1927) and Hamburg (1931) were the next places he resided as a young conductor, before succeeding Fritz Busch as head of Dresden's Semper Opera in 1934. He secured a top post at the Vienna State Opera in 1943, eventually becoming music director.

Böhm's career prospered after he had completed a two year post-war denazification ban, with his native country usually the focus of his work. The Vienna Philharmonic and the Salzburg Festival featured prominently. He additionally resumed ties in Dresden, at the Staatskapelle.

In 1957, he made his debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, conducting Don Giovanni, and quickly became one of the favorite conductors of the Rudolf Bing era, conducting, all told, 262 performances, including the house premieres of Ariadne auf Naxos and Die Frau ohne Schatten (which was the first major success in the new house at Lincoln Center), and many other major productions such as Fidelio for the Beethoven bicentennial, Die Zauberflöte, Tristan und Isolde (including the house debut performance of Birgit Nilsson in 1959), Otello, Der Rosenkavalier, Salome, Wozzeck, Elektra and others. He conducted at Bayreuth in 1966 and 1967, resulting in critically acclaimed recordings of the entire Ring cycle and also Tristan und Isolde.

Late in life, he began a guest-conducting relationship with the London Symphony Orchestra (LSO) in a 1973 appearance at the Salzburg Festival. He was given the title of LSO President, which he held until his death.

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

It is believed that Böhm was an early sympathizer of the Nazi party, although he never became a member. In November 1923 he stopped a rehearsal in the Munich opera house in order, reportedly, to watch Adolf Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch. 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".

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. 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!"

While music director in Dresden he "poured forth rhetoric glorifying the Nazi regime and its cultural aims". 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..."

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