"Born in Graz in Austria in 1894, Karl Böhm began his professional career at the Munich Opera working alongside Bruno Walter and Richard Strauss. It was here
that he acquired his Mozart style: cogent, balanced, and subtly various. Strauss, in particular, was much preoccupied with the ideal pacing of a Mozart score.
Learning how to fine-tune the Mozart musical engine, then drive it vividly and exactingly along, was for Böhm an education whose value extended beyond Mozart to the wider operatic and symphonic repertoire.
In September 1962 Deutsche Grammophon released a recording of Mozart’s Symphony No.40 that Böhm had made in Berlin earlier in the year. ‘Strong,
straightforward and enjoyable’ wrote Edward Greenfield in The Gramophone, but possibly ‘a little pale and unmemorable’. As a Salzburg regular and keen Böhmwatcher, Greenfield would have known that ‘pale and unmemorable’ was the last thing Böhm’s Mozart was when he was making music live on home soil. Soloist Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau retained particular memories of the Mozart that evening. The sound, he recalled was very different and ‘more correct’ than that the Berlin Philharmonic had recently produced for ‘another star of
the podium’.
Much has been made of Mahler's choice of the subject of the death of children, and his wife Alma's angry response to it. The songs may, indeed, appear to
have tempted fate. Mahler’s four-year-old daughter, Maria, later died of diphtheria, just as two of the poet Rückert’s children had. Yet Mahler had no children when he began work on the cycle in 1901. Memories of childhood deaths among his own brothers and sisters are a more likely cue for the settings. Unbearable as the events had been, by 1901 they were now sufficiently distant in time to be distilled by Mahler into music that embodies grief yet does not luxuriate in it.
Strauss was 32 when he completed Also sprach Zarathustra in August 1896. His aim had been to trace in music the idea of the human race from its origins,
through its various phases of religious and scientific development, to the idea of the Superman as set out in Nietzsche’s rhapsodic prose-poem. Strauss does not so much paraphrase Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra as stand at a provocative angle to it. To some it is a garish piece of orchestral kitsch, for others it is far from that.
Indeed, it was the release of a recording of Also sprach Zarathustra by Böhm and the Berlin Philharmonic in 1958 that led Strauss aficionado and scholar William Mann to produce a stirring defence of the piee in the columns of The Gramophone."
