Charles Munch was a German classical music conductor who became a distinguished music director most famously with the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1949 to 1962. Lauded for his repertoire of works by French composers, notably Hector Berlioz, he also made recordings of German and Austrian music as well as selected works by Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorak, Mahler, Strauss and Tchaikovsky. In 2016 Sony Classics released an 86-disc box set of his Boston Symphony recordings with almost 65 hours of music.
Born in Alsace-Lorraine, then part of the German empire, his father was a music professor and he learned to play violin as a child. He studied at the Strasbourg Conservatoire and then with Carl Flesch in Berlin and also attended the Conservatoire de Paris. Following military service for Germany in World War I, he spent time with the Strasbourg Philharmonic Orchestra, the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. He made his debut as a conductor in Paris in 1932 and led various French orchestras throughout the 1930s. In 1938 he was named director of the Société Philharmonique de Paris and during World War II he remained in the occupied French capital. He performed publicly in that time but reportedly gave his income to the French Resistance. In 1945 he was awarded the French Legion of Honour.
He made his debut in Boston in 1946 and after he became music director with the Symphony, he made his name with the works of Berlioz, Debussy and Ravel. The orchestra appeared on a weekly television program produced by Boston's WGBH-TV television station and syndicated across America. There were international tours and Munch made guest appearances with other orchestras in Chicago, Hungary and Canada. He was nominated six times for a Grammy Award with two wins. He continued to conduct internationally until his death aged 77 from a heart attack in 1968.
