Karl Böhm was many things. He was one of great conductors of his generation, and his career flourished during the Nazi regime. He, like many German and Austrian artists of the 1930s and 1940s, is controversial. I am posting him because of his artistic achievement and in spite of his political alliances. I have described the issues with respect to his political responsibility below.
In addition to the Freischutz overture, I have posted Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 23 A major K 488, with Maurizio Pollini as soloist. Böhm was a great artist. Whether he was a great human is a subject that is still up for debate.
Karl Böhm
August 28, 1894 – August 14, 1981
Karl Böhm was born in Graz, Austria of German-Bohemian descent through his father (“Böhm” may be translated as meaning “Bohemian”), and of French-Alsatian lineage on his mother’s side. Böhm studied law at the University of Graz, while also taking lessons in piano and theory at the Graz Conservatory. He went on to study at the Vienna Conservatory between 1913 and 1914 with Eusebius Mandyczewski, who had been a close colleague of Brahms, and with Guido Adler. Böhm served in the Austrian army during WWI, returning to civilian life after sustaining an injury. He continued his twin-track career on the one hand working as a répétiteur from 1917 at the Graz Opera and on the other hand continuing his legal studies, receiving a doctorate in law from the University of Graz in 1919.
Böhm did not have any formal training as a conductor. He made his conducting debut in 1917 at the Graz Opera, with Victor Nessler’s now forgotten opera Der Trompeter von Säckingen. In 1919, he was appointed first conductor at Graz. While conducting an intensively prepared performance there of Lohengrin, he was heard by the distinguished German conductor Karl Muck who offered to coach him in the music of Wagner. With Muck Böhm studied the Ring cycle, Tristan und Isolde, and Die Meistersinger. This tutelage stood Böhm in good stead, especially in relation to Tristan, a work with which he was to become closely identified. Muck also recommended him to Bruno Walter, at this time the general music director at the Munich Opera and one of the most important younger conductors in Germany.
Walter engaged Böhm as an assistant, and he remained in Munich for six years, from 1921 to 1927. In Munich, Böhm worked initially with Walter, and later, with Hans Knappertsbusch, and he conducted five hundred and twenty-eight performances there of seventy-three different operas. In 1927, he was appointed chief conductor at the Darmstadt Opera, where he stayed until 1931. Here he was noted for his championing of contemporary music, in 1928 presenting Berg’s opera Wozzeck, with the composer attending the first day of rehearsals. Böhm was to become as famous for his interpretations of Berg’s two operas as he was for his Wagner performances.
In 1931, he moved to Hamburg again, as chief conductor at the opera, succeeding Egon Pollak. A year of great significance followed for Böhm in 1933. First, he met Richard Strauss, when the composer came to Hamburg to assist in the preparation of performances of his opera Arabella. The two developed a close relationship that was to last for the remainder of Strauss’s life, and through Strauss, Böhm developed a deep understanding of Mozart. During this period, Böhm had also been building up his concert career, for instance with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. In April 1933, Clemens Krauss resigned from the Vienna Philharmonic as conductor, and Böhm stepped into the breach for a concert. He also conducted Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna State Opera. This was the beginning of a significant musical partnership with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra that was to last until Böhm’s death. Finally, in 1933, following his debut at the Dresden Opera, he was invited to succeed Fritz Busch as chief conductor, with effect from 1934. He stayed at Dresden until 1943, enjoying excellent working conditions with a fine roster of singers and an orchestra of exceptional quality. Here his friendship with Strauss deepened: he conducted the premiere of Die schweigsame Frau in 1935 and of Daphne, which Strauss dedicated to him, in 1938. In 1936, Strauss, Böhm, and the Dresden company made a very successful visit to England, and in 1938, Böhm made his first appearance at the Salzburg Festival, conducting Don Giovanni. During this period, he also made a series of very distinguished recordings for the German gramophone company Electrola, which covered both the operatic and concert repetoires.
At the beginning of 1943, Böhm took over as chief conductor of the Vienna State Opera, where he maintained and developed the high standards of the company as many contemporary raido recordings attest. The performance of Ariadne auf Naxos arranged to celebrate Strauss’s eightieth birthday in 1944 probably marks the high point musically, if not politically, of Böhm’s first Viennese period. With the collapse of Germany and the Allied victory at the end of WWII, he was forbidden to conduct in Germany and Austria until 1947. However, he gradually rebuilt his conducting career in Europe, and between 1950 and 1953 was responsible for the German repertoire at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. In 1954, he was preferred to his rival Clemens Krauss for the post of chief conductor at the Vienna State Opera, and he opened the rebuilt opera house in 1955 with an incandescent performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio. His second period at the helm in Vienna did not last long; he resigned in 1956 in the face of intense criticism for his absences from the city.
Henceforth, Böhm was to hold no further permanent musical posts, preferring to guest conduct exclusively. In 1957, he was engaged by Rudolf Bing, who had worked with him previously at Darmstadt, to appear at the Metropolitan Opera, New York. He made his debut in October of that year with Don Giovanni, which was highly praised. Later, he was to conduct many notable productions at the Met, Including Die Frau ohne Schatten, Die Meistersinger, and Wozzeck. In 1970, he was named as general music director of Austria, and in 1977, as president of the London Symphony Orchestra, with which he had appeared at the Salzburg Festival. Throughout this period, he was active as a guest conductor with orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Berlin Radio Symphony, the London Symphony, the Dresden Symphony, the Vienna Symphony, and the Vienna Philharmonic. He also was very active in the recording studio, recording for several labels, most notably Deutsche Grammophon. In 1981, he suffered a stroke from which he never fully recovered, dying in August of that year in Salzburg.
Böhm was a precise and undemonstrative conductor from whom any form of music exaggeration was rare in performance. As with many great conductors the essential work was done earlier in rehearsal, where he was found by many orchestras to be a too hard, if ultimately fair, taskmaster, able to draw performances of great refinement and strength from the ensemble with which he worked. His discography is huge and contains many exceptional performances.
Taken from Conductors A to Z by David Patmore
Karl Böhm and the Third Reich
Like Richard Strauss, Böhm had a complicated and problematic relationship with the Third Reich, despite never officially joining the party. Böhm benefited from the Nazi regime’s dismissal of Jewish colleagues, notably rising to posts in Dresden replacing Fritz Busch in 1934 who had been dismissed for opposing the Nazis. In Dresden, Böhm aligned with the cultural propaganda efforts of the party, glorifying the Nazi regime in “extreme career opportunism at the expense of personal morality.” By 1935-36, throughout the Nuremburg laws and further denunciations of his Jewish artistic counterparts, Böhm openly praised Hitler’s cultural vision, declaring fidelity to serving the Nazi interests in Vienna, and conducting Wagner’s Die Meistersinger at the Nuremberg Rally. Following the 1938 Anschluss, Böhm delivered a formal Hitler salute in Vienna and insisted that supporting the Anschluss was an essential quality of being German. By early 1943, Karl Böhm accepted the position of General Music Director of the Vienna State Opera, succeeding Bruno Walter, who had been forced into exile due to his Jewish heritage. This career move came during the height of Nazi control, and Böhm’s appointment was facilitated by the regime, much like Herbert von Karajan’s earlier displacement of Bruno Walter in Berlin. Although Böhm was denazified in the postwar, his rise is generally viewed as opportunism at the expense of Jewish and other colleagues.
His legacy endures in both the concert hall and opera house, where his interpretations continue to influence performance traditions. However, Böhm’s aesthetic power and choices as a conductor raise questions about the ability to fully denazify the cultural realm, and the separation of arts and politics in the postwar. Böhm is a parallel to the moral questions of complicity raised by his conductor peers: Herbert von Karajan and Wilhelm Furtwängler. Furtwängler, Böhm, and von Karajan both continued to conduct throughout the Third Reich and all had comparable postwar careers. Because of their staggering contributions to the field and landmark interpretations and recordings, they have been lionized to varying degrees in the scholarship with divergent and highly subjective perceptions on their links to National Socialism. Composers and artists in the immediate wake of the war attempted to justify their actions with the party to the allies, often on aesthetic grounds as well as citing material and detrimental impacts to their career. For example, Böhm is often cited as programming modern works at odds with the regime amidst his embrace of Nazi cultural policies, and he was officially cleared by denazification by the early 1950s.
Karl Böhm exemplifies the paradox of artistic leadership during the Nazi period. He aligned publicly with the regime and opportunistically benefited from the displacement and exile of his colleagues, yet returned to an illustrious career in the postwar. His recordings, particularly of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, and Strauss are valuable, leading interpretations of significant works in the classical canon, often made with orchestras which also had a complicated institutional history with the Reich, like the Berlin Philharmonic. The question with the denazification of individuals returns to questions of complicity, of their collaboration with the Reich, and of their postwar contributions to society.