Karl Böhm Essentials

Karl Böhm was heralded by critics, colleagues and audiences for his luxuriant performances of Germanic music and opera—especially that of his friend, composer Richard Strauss, and the Late Romantic Richard Wagner, whose gargantuan Ring cycle Böhm recorded at the composer's festival in Bayreuth. Böhm became director of the Dresden State Opera in 1934, and took over the Vienna State Opera in 1943, where he performed Strauss despite a ban on the music by Nazi Joseph Goebbels. Some critics still believe that Böhm was a Nazi sympathiser, but he was officially cleared of such allegations in 1947. Later, Böhm performed in Buenos Aires and at New York's Metropolitan Opera. Despite his Late Romantic repertoire, he was an ardent interpreter of modernist Alban Berg as well as Mozart, whose symphonies he recorded in 1974.