The son of a lawyer, he studied law and earned a doctorate in this subject before entering the music conservatory in his home town of Graz.

[1] In 1917, Böhm became a rehearsal assistant in his home town, making his debut as a conductor in Viktor Nessler's Der Trompeter von Säckingen in 1917.

[2] An early assignment here was Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail, with a cast which included Maria Ivogün, Paul Bender, and Richard Tauber.

After he had completed a two-year post-war denazification ban, Böhm led Don Giovanni at La Scala, Milan (1948) and gave a guest performance in Paris with the Vienna State Opera company (1949).

From 1950 to 1953 he directed the German season at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires, and he conducted the first performance in Spanish of Wozzeck by Alban Berg, translated for the occasion.

On a less common front, he championed and recorded Alban Berg's avant-garde operas Wozzeck and Lulu before they gained a foothold in the standard repertory.

Böhm mentioned in the notes to his recordings of these works that he and Berg discussed the orchestrations, leading to changes in the score (as he had similarly done, previously, with Richard Strauss).

Böhm’s musical approach, expressed in strictly functional gestures, was direct, fresh, energetic and authoritative, avoiding touches of romantic sentimentality or self-indulgent virtuoso mannerisms ...

[1] He was widely fêted on his 80th birthday ten years later; his colleague Herbert von Karajan presented him with a clock to mark that occasion.

[10] The historian Michael H. Kater records that while Böhm was music director in Dresden (1934–43) he "poured forth rhetoric glorifying the Nazi regime and their cultural aims".

[11] Kater ranks Böhm in that group of artists in 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.

[11] Kater contrasts this conduct with Böhm's "aesthetically faultless and sometimes politically daring" choice of repertory, and his collaborations with 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".