held until his death. He twice conducted at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in the 1970s: Le nozze di Figaro in 1977 and Così fan tutte in 1979. Death, family, legacy Böhm died in Salzburg, two weeks before his 87th birthday. He conducted the premieres of Strauss's late works Die schweigsame Frau (1935) and Daphne (1938), of which he is the dedicatee, recorded all the major operas (but often made cuts to the scores), and regularly revived Strauss's operas with strong casts during his tenures in Vienna and Dresden, as well as at the Salzburg Festival. Böhm was praised for his rhythmically robust interpretations of the operas and symphonies of Mozart, and in the 1960s he was entrusted with recording all the Mozart symphonies with the Berlin Philharmonic. His brisk, straightforward approach to Wagner won adherents, as did his readings of the symphonies of Brahms, Bruckner, and Schubert. His complete recordings of the Beethoven symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1971 was also highly regarded. 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). He was described by one critic as one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century. Grove says of him: He received two exclusive titles: "Ehrendirigent" of the Vienna Philharmonic and Austrian "Generalmusikdirektor". 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. Böhm was married to the soprano Thea Linhard. His son Karlheinz Böhm was a successful actor. Nazi sympathies Although Böhm never joined the Nazi party, in public and in private he continually expressed strong support for Hitler and his regime. The extent to which this was a matter of conviction rather than careerism is uncertain and the subject of much speculation. Böhm's son maintained that his father was warned that if he defected from Nazi Germany, every member of his family would be sent to a concentration camp, but Böhm's support of the Nazis predated their rise to power. The historian Michael H. Kater records that while Böhm was music director in Dresden (1934–43) he "poured forth rhetoric