On January 19, 2018 Deutsche Grammophon will release "Karl Böhm: The Operas
Complete DG Recordings".
"70 CDs presenting Karl Böhm's complete vocal recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, including studio productions as well as timeless live recordings from Vienna, Salzburg and Bayreuth.
Additional spoken word recordings (in German) with Böhm detailing his relationships with Richard Strauss, Mozart and the Vienna Philharmonic: including one full disc of recordings new to CD (English synopsis for CD 70, "A Life Retold" available online)
PACKAGING: A lift-off box featuring new liner notes by Richard Osborne
The 1944 Ariadne auf Naxos (CDs 45-46) available digitally for the first time"
Considering the following information taken from his Wikipedia biography in a section entitled "Nazi Sympathies" -
" On 28 December 2015 the Salzburg Festival announced that it will affix a plaque on its Karl Böhm refreshment lobby (Karl-Böhm-Saal) acknowledging the conductor's complicity with Nazi Germany, which will say that "Böhm was a beneficiary of the Third Reich and used its system to advance his career. His ascent was facilitated by the expulsion of Jewish and politically out-of-favor colleagues".
Austrian Radio (ORF) quoted Festival president Helga Rabl-Stadler as calling Böhm as "a great artist but fatally flawed politically". 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".
Kater, in his 1997 Oxford University Press book The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich, says that while Böhm was music director in Dresden (1934-43), he "poured forth rhetoric glorifying the Nazi regime and its cultural aims". Kater also documents how Böhm told Nazi authorities in 1935 that he could be "of propagandist service to Nazis interests by giving concerts" in Vienna, where he had "many followers... especially in the National Socialist camp," and how later that year Böhm praised "the deep artistic comprehension of the Führer"; he also "repeatedly" conducted music from Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at opening ceremonies for the Nazi Party's annual Nuremberg Rally.
Kater also says that Böhm's two "main career moves" in the Nazi era "tended to taint his post-1945 reputation." Kater argues that the 1934 move to the Dresden Opera to replace Fritz Busch after the latter's "politically motivated" dismissal by Nazi authorities showed Böhm's "extreme careerist opportunism at the expense of personal morality" and was facilitated directly by Hitler, who obtained for Böhm an early release from his previous contract;
Kater also says Böhm's 1943 move to Vienna was something "Hitler wanted" by July 1942 - which is contrary to Böhm's claim that Hitler consistently opposed the move; Kater adds that shortly after Böhm's January 1943 installation in Vienna, Hitler awarded him the Martial Order of Merit.
Lebrecht notes that after the 1938 Austrian referendum controlled by the Nazis to justify Germany's annexation of Austria, or Anschluss, the conductor told its orchestra 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!"
In 1939, Böhm contributed to the Newspapers of the Comradeship of German Artists special congratulatory edition on the occasion of Hitler's 50th birthday, writing, "The path of today's music in the sphere of symphonic works... has been marked and paved by the ideology [Weltanschauung] of National Socialism..."
Lebrecht also states that in the wake of the Anschluss, Böhm gave the Hitler salute during a concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, ironically violating Nazi rules about places where the greeting was appropriate.
Still, Kater notes "shades of gray," citing Böhm's "aesthetically faultless and sometimes politically daring" choice of repertory, and his collaborations with some anti-Nazi directors and designers, which "could have been interpreted by enemies of the Nazi regime as a brave attempt to preserve the principle of artistic freedom, He also mentions Böhm's claim that he sent his son Karlheinz to Switzerland in (to quote Kater) "anticipation of his own eventual flight from the Third Reich."
Anyone else feel somewhat queasy about purchasing this particular release?
Complete DG Recordings".
"70 CDs presenting Karl Böhm's complete vocal recordings on Deutsche Grammophon, including studio productions as well as timeless live recordings from Vienna, Salzburg and Bayreuth.
Additional spoken word recordings (in German) with Böhm detailing his relationships with Richard Strauss, Mozart and the Vienna Philharmonic: including one full disc of recordings new to CD (English synopsis for CD 70, "A Life Retold" available online)
PACKAGING: A lift-off box featuring new liner notes by Richard Osborne
The 1944 Ariadne auf Naxos (CDs 45-46) available digitally for the first time"
Considering the following information taken from his Wikipedia biography in a section entitled "Nazi Sympathies" -
" On 28 December 2015 the Salzburg Festival announced that it will affix a plaque on its Karl Böhm refreshment lobby (Karl-Böhm-Saal) acknowledging the conductor's complicity with Nazi Germany, which will say that "Böhm was a beneficiary of the Third Reich and used its system to advance his career. His ascent was facilitated by the expulsion of Jewish and politically out-of-favor colleagues".
Austrian Radio (ORF) quoted Festival president Helga Rabl-Stadler as calling Böhm as "a great artist but fatally flawed politically". 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".
Kater, in his 1997 Oxford University Press book The Twisted Muse: Musicians and Their Music in the Third Reich, says that while Böhm was music director in Dresden (1934-43), he "poured forth rhetoric glorifying the Nazi regime and its cultural aims". Kater also documents how Böhm told Nazi authorities in 1935 that he could be "of propagandist service to Nazis interests by giving concerts" in Vienna, where he had "many followers... especially in the National Socialist camp," and how later that year Böhm praised "the deep artistic comprehension of the Führer"; he also "repeatedly" conducted music from Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg at opening ceremonies for the Nazi Party's annual Nuremberg Rally.
Kater also says that Böhm's two "main career moves" in the Nazi era "tended to taint his post-1945 reputation." Kater argues that the 1934 move to the Dresden Opera to replace Fritz Busch after the latter's "politically motivated" dismissal by Nazi authorities showed Böhm's "extreme careerist opportunism at the expense of personal morality" and was facilitated directly by Hitler, who obtained for Böhm an early release from his previous contract;
Kater also says Böhm's 1943 move to Vienna was something "Hitler wanted" by July 1942 - which is contrary to Böhm's claim that Hitler consistently opposed the move; Kater adds that shortly after Böhm's January 1943 installation in Vienna, Hitler awarded him the Martial Order of Merit.
Lebrecht notes that after the 1938 Austrian referendum controlled by the Nazis to justify Germany's annexation of Austria, or Anschluss, the conductor told its orchestra 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!"
In 1939, Böhm contributed to the Newspapers of the Comradeship of German Artists special congratulatory edition on the occasion of Hitler's 50th birthday, writing, "The path of today's music in the sphere of symphonic works... has been marked and paved by the ideology [Weltanschauung] of National Socialism..."
Lebrecht also states that in the wake of the Anschluss, Böhm gave the Hitler salute during a concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, ironically violating Nazi rules about places where the greeting was appropriate.
Still, Kater notes "shades of gray," citing Böhm's "aesthetically faultless and sometimes politically daring" choice of repertory, and his collaborations with some anti-Nazi directors and designers, which "could have been interpreted by enemies of the Nazi regime as a brave attempt to preserve the principle of artistic freedom, He also mentions Böhm's claim that he sent his son Karlheinz to Switzerland in (to quote Kater) "anticipation of his own eventual flight from the Third Reich."
Anyone else feel somewhat queasy about purchasing this particular release?