The beginning of a late career

Born to a lawyer father, Karl Böhm learned law in Graz. Nevertheless, from middle school, between classes, he hid behind the scenes of the opera to listen to the rehearsals and studied music and piano, at the Graz Conservatory of Music, then in Vienna, where he studied with Guido Adler and Eusebius Mandyczevski - a friend of Brahms - between 1913 and 1914. Wounded during the war, he returned to Graz and decided to become a conductor. The Graz theater entrusted him with the direction of several operas and named him director in 1920. The following year, Bruno Walter hired him in Munich as troupe leader and fourth conductor.

Richard Strauss: an unwavering friendship

Richard Strauss put him at the top of the bill in Hamburg and Dresden.
In 1927 the Darmstadt theater hired him and allowed him to produce many operas, despite limited resources. He performs Parsifal by Wagner and Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky, but also works by contemporaries like Honegger, Hindemith and Berg. Then he left for Hamburg, where he met Richard Strauss, who would accelerate his career.

Strauss allowed him to take charge of the Dresden Opera in 1934, in place of Fritz Busch, chased out by the Nazis. He stayed there for ten years and created numerous operas and symphonies. In 1938 he conducted for the first time in Salzburg, where he returned almost every year.

Wiener Staatsoper

Appointed to the Vienna State Opera in 1943, Böhm returned there in 1955 to inaugurate its reopening. Rather docile under the Nazi regime, he was appointed director of the Vienna Staatsoper, which was destroyed in March 1945 by a bombing. Böhm was banned from activity for two years after the war and began conducting again in 1947. He was invited to Milan, Paris, London, Buenos Aires and soon New York. In 1955, he reopened the Staatsoper with Beethoven's Fidelio, but did not succeed in taking over the direction of the Salzburg Festival, facing Karajan who was chosen and remained there for thirty years!

He traveled widely and from 1962 conducted operas in Bayreuth every year, becoming a Wagner specialist. But he is also considered a great interpreter of Mozart, to whom Bruno Walter had introduced him, and is often offered Don Giovanni. His recording of the Requiem with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1971 remains one of the great reference versions.

Die on stage

Böhm continued to conduct until the end of his life. His last concert was dedicated to Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro . He died in Salzburg in 1981, during a rehearsal of Elektra by Richard Strauss.