[2] He worked as a conductor in Lübeck, Oldenburg, and Berlin (Staatsoper, Deutsche Oper) before emigrating to Italy in 1933 and then to the United States in 1936.
[7] On 17 October 1954, Harold Byrns conducted the first public performance of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Symphony in F sharp, on Austrian radio.
[16] He was a personal friend of Mahler's widow Alma, and he played an important role in making her agree to public performances of Deryck Cooke's realisation of the 10th Symphony.
He had a commission from Herbert von Karajan to orchestrate some piano pieces by Robert Schumann, and from Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau for some Mahler songs for which he also made the English translation.
He was responsible for the complete orchestration of Nicolas Nabokov's opera Love's Labour's Lost, premiered in Brussels in 1973.
[2] For Otto Klemperer's debut in Copenhagen in 1947, he arranged a suite from Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen.
His son was Peter Salm[7] (1919–1990), Professor Emeritus of Literature and German at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and a specialist in the works of Goethe and other European literary figures.