Tune in every day @ 1 PM when host Chris Wolf will feature a complete work lead by the Austrian conductor.

The recordings of Karl Böhm have lately enjoyed a well-deserved renaissance. The Austrian conductor's emphasis on rhythmic, textural and

structural clarity is now recognized as a blueprint for timeless interpretations of Mozart, his greatest love, as well as Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and his friend Richard Strauss.

Deutsche Grammophon has released a new box set featuring many of the famous performances Böhm had with the Berlin Philharmonic, with whom he maintained a close relatioship for more than 45 years.

allmusic.com biographer Joseph Stevenson writes:

Karl Böhm was one of the greatest conductors of the twentieth century in the German tradition. He studied music as a child and continued to work and study in music while serving in the Austrian Army during World War I -- and while completing a doctorate in law. He coached singers at the Graz Opera and was permitted to conduct a performance of Nessler's Der Trompeter von Sackingen. He never had conducting lessons, but made close studies of the work of both Bruno Walter and Carl Muck.

In 1921 he was hired by the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, and then he became Generalmusikdirektor in both Darmstadt (1927) and Hamburg (1931-1933). He gained a reputation for his fine performances of Mozart, Wagner, and Richard Strauss, as well as his championing of modern German music, including operas by Krenek and Berg. Böhm debuted in Vienna in 1933, leading Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. In 1934 he became director of the Dresden State Opera, Richard Strauss's favorite theater. There, Böhm conducted premieres of Strauss's Die schweigsame Frau (1935) and Dafne (1938). He remained at the helm in Dresden through 1943, at which point he became director of the Vienna State Opera (1943-1945). Richard Strauss was not in official favor, and Joseph Goebbels banned any recognition of the great composer's 80th birthday in 1944. However, Böhm participated in a de facto observance, as a large number of Strauss's orchestral and operatic works "just happened" to be played about the time of the birthday.

After the war, Böhm was forbidden to perform until he underwent "de-Nazification," a procedure whereby prominent Austro-Germans were investigated for complicity in Nazi crimes. He was eventually cleared of any suspicion, and was permitted to resume work in 1947.

Böhm oversaw the German repertory at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires (1950-1953), and again served as director of the Vienna State Opera (1954-1956). He debuted in the USA at New York's Metropolitan Opera with Mozart's Don Giovanni in 1957, and took prominent German orchestras and opera companies on tour. The Vienna Philharmonic bestowed on him the title "Ehrendirigent," and he was proclaimed Generalmusikdirector of Austria. He left a legacy of many great recordings, including a complete Wagner Ring cycle considered by many critics to be the best. While his Wagner and Strauss were sumptuously Romantic, his Mozart was scrupulously Classical in approach.

 

 

In December of 2015 the Salzburg Festival board decided to affix a plaque to the Karl Böhm Saal, specifying that the conductor, while musically gifted, was an enthusiastic Nazi who used the inhumanities of the Hitler regime to advance his career. The plaque is engraved in German and English.

‘He was a great artist but fatally flawed politically,’ said Festival president Helga Rabl-Stadler.

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." While Böhm appears never to have joined the Nazi party, he praised it publicly as early as 1930, and cooperated with it in many ways as a professional.

According to music journalist Norman Lebrecht, in November 1923 Böhm stopped a rehearsal in the Munich opera house in order 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".

 

 Source: http://www.allmusic.com/artist/karl-b%C3%B6hm-mn0000182286/biography

             http://slippedisc.com/2015/12/karl-bohm-is-named-a-nazi-in-salzburg/

             https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_B%C3%B6hm

 

 

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