Experience the life, inspirations and iconic recordings of conductor Georg Solti

“No matter who I know, what receptions I go to, I am first and foremost a musician at the service of the composer whose music I’m playing.”

Hungarian-born conductor Sir Georg Solti was the epitome of the maestro, though he never lorded it over his musicians. On the podium in rehearsal he had the gift of galvanising everyone with his legendary iron will (he had an unshakable conviction as to “how the music should go”); in performance he often created electrifying results, and he famously transformed what could be produced in the recording studio during his fifty-year partnership with Decca.  

Solti’s success was hard won. Perhaps no other conductor worked so hard to achieve his idea of perfection or to earn the applause of his audiences.

Born a Hungarian Jew, a victim of anti-Semitism in Budapest, his career was stalled during the Second World War when he was stuck in Switzerland for seven years. When he was nearly fifty he finally hit the big time and never wasted a moment thereafter.

Solti’s rise coincided with the first recording experimentations with a new-fangled idea called stereo. He signed his first contract with Decca in 1947 and within a decade was presiding over the first complete studio recording of Wagner’s Ring cycle, which remains one of the towering landmarks of recorded music. Fifty years on their unbroken partnership had amassed more than 250 recordings including at least 45 complete operas. Solti himself won 32 Grammys; more than any other artist, classical or popular.

In 1998 when the Chicago Symphony toured Australia for our bicentennial celebrations I was lucky to interview Solti and broadcast their performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony for the ABC. Even in his 70s he had the energy of someone half his age and exuded an irresistible animal magnetism. The experience radically influenced my expectation of what magic could be wrought by an orchestra and conductor. It set the gold standard.

Later I worked with Sir Georg and the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester and attended Decca’s celebration in London of their fiftieth anniversary with the conductor where the company presented him with a new mountain bike! He was nearly 85!

“I decided immediately that I wanted to be a conductor, not a pianist”

Solti was born György Stern in 1912 into a Jewish family in Budapest. He always said he was lucky to grow up in a country that “lives and breathes music.” His only sibling was his sister, Lily, a gifted soprano twelve years his senior. “I was a spoilt little boy. Everyone danced attendance on me.”

After the First World War, under pressure from the Fascist to “Hungarianise” foreign surnames, young György’s father changed his name to Solti, after a small town in central Hungary.

Despite financial difficulties at home, his mother recognized he had “the makings of a musician” and found the money for piano lessons. “I was an incredibly lazy boy. What ten-year-old boy wants to play the piano when he could be out playing football?” But Solti would accompany his sister, “I made so many mistakes but it was invaluable experience for an opera conductor. I learnt to swim with her.”

The family was close and Solti would relate how he played the piano in a local pub to help pay off the gambling debts of a black sheep uncle. He also helped pay for his own education by giving lessons from age 13 whilst he studied at the famous but very strict Liszt Academy in Budapest.

His teachers included Ernő Dohnányi, composition, Leó Weiner, conducting, and briefly Béla Bartók, piano. He often paid tribute to Weiner for the basic conducting skills he learnt in his class. “Knowing how to listen, when to follow, when to lead and why and how, and knowing how to pinpoint and fix what was wrong. I cannot emphasize how grateful I am to him.”

Concerts were another important part of Solti’s early education. “The first time a symphonic piece really touched me was when the great Erich Kleiber conducted Beethoven’s 5th. I was not more than 14 and I felt as if I’d been hit by lightning. I decided immediately that I wanted to be a conductor, not a pianist.”

After he graduated aged 19, Solti tried to get a job but being Jewish, it was out of the question. Undaunted, Solti talked his way into a job as repetiteur with the Budapest Opera, working initially for no fee.

“I can say without hesitation that I became the best repetiteur ever. Working closely with singers year after year was invaluable later in my career. I was able to follow the worst singer to hell and back. I could have followed a bird chirping.”

On March 11, 1938, he was finally given a break. The chance to conduct Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, without a rehearsal. “That was quite a night. All my friends left at intermission. It was the day of the Anschluss and the news came that Hitler had marched into Vienna and everyone ran home thinking he was coming on to Budapest. This was a damp ending to my debut, there wasn’t even a celebration after the performance.” Solti was 25 and felt all his hopes had been dashed. He never conducted the Budapest Opera again. “That evening left a permanent scar on my heart.”

“I bought myself a blue Harris Tweed suit”

Solti nearly moved to Australia! In 1938 he made a brief visit to London at the invitation of Antal Doráti, who’d invited him to conduct part of the Ballets Russe’s summer season at Covent Garden. “I knew no-one apart from the Dorati family and was unbearably lonely most of the time because I spoke little English and no French or Russian. One thing I do remember is I went to Montague Burtons, the tailors in the Strand, and bought myself a blue Harris Tweed suit; the only suit I owned through the war years and beyond.”

A few days before the season ended, “Colonel de Basil offered me a contract to tour Australia with the company. I suppose I should have jumped at the offer but I didn’t see the European situation as very serious at the time, and I’d realised at the first rehearsal that I didn’t like conducting ballet, because of the necessity of changing tempi in a most unmusical way.”

“Don’t come home”

Young Solti’s fate in Budapest was decided when he was 27. On 15 August 1939, with Jews barred from contract appointments in Hungary, and a bleak future, Solti took a train to Switzerland, visiting for just a few days to see if Toscanini, who was conducting at Lucerne Festival could help him find work. “Si’ Si’” said the maestro, “I live in New York – when you come over, contact me and I’ll try to help.”

The very next day Solti received a telegram from his mother: DON’T COME HOME. With the outbreak of war and the borders closed, he became confined in Switzerland for seven years, working as a repetiteur and voice-coach. He also resumed his career as a pianist (he remained an excellent pianist all his life) winning the piano division of 1942 Swiss Music Competition which helped him get a teaching permit. He never saw his father again.

“No other accolade in my entire life matched that single word from Toscanini”

In 1946 Solti met Maurice Rosengarten who held the Decca sales franchise for Switzerland and Germany. Rosengarten recalled, “The first thing he said was that he wanted to conduct. He was so sure of himself that I decided he must have the makings of a great conductor. He promised that he would do his best and he has kept that promise.”

Solti had had his first recording experience playing glockenspiel on a 1937 Toscanini performance of The Magic Flute in Salzburg. “Bene” said the maestro, and Solti always said, “no other accolade in my entire life matched that single word from Toscanini.”

Decca, founded in 1929 by Sir Edward Lewis, was starting to experiment with a new-fangled idea called stereo. Solti made his first recording with the company as a pianist, accompanying the distinguished violinist Georg Kulenkampff in February 1947 in Zurich.

Within a decade he was presiding over the first complete studio recording of Wagner’s Ring cycle – a prize that had eluded all the greats before him and remains one of the towering landmarks of recorded music. Initially the plan was to record Die Walküre, but it was the beginning of stereo and the Decca team recognized that Das Rheingold had “all the noises that people will want to show their hi-fi off with.” It sold like proverbial hot cakes.

It was John Culshaw, Decca’s new producer, who had recognized as early as 1949 and 1950 after seeing Solti conductor Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Wagner’s Die Walküre in Munich, that operatic repertoire was where Solti could show what he could do.

Solti was in the right place at the right time, though he may not have immediately realised this. “I came to understand what an extraordinarily adaptable and professional man Solti had become throughout his years of theatrical experience. Nothing on earth would persuade him to accept an artistic result lower than the best he could get within the time available and with the forces at his disposal,” said Culshaw.

“Like Faust, I would have been prepared to make a pact with the devil and go to hell with him in order to conduct”

After the war, Solti won the post of Music Director of the Bavarian State Opera in 1946. Ideally placed as a proven non-Nazi, he was head-hunted in Switzerland to conduct Fidelio and was based in Munich for the next six years, followed by a nine-year stint in Frankfurt.

From the first secure bases in his life, and armed with his Decca contract, he guest-conducted in the UK, Europe and America. “Like Faust, I would have been prepared to make a pact with the devil and go to hell with him in order to conduct.”

During this period he made his Covent Garden debut in 1959 and in 1961 took the helm as music director for a roller-coaster decade of new productions and recordings.

He was regarded by many in the orchestra and the business as excessively autocratic and had a lengthy battle with London critics in the early years who charged him with being overexcitable and nicknamed him “the Prussian of Covent Garden.” The musicians called him “the screaming skull” but Solti was driven by his late career start, his “outsider” status and his desire to work hard. He hated time-wasters. “It took a while for the English to understand that I wasn’t commanding people, but rather encouraging them to seek improvement.”

In truth, thanks to his determination, theatrical experience and commitment, Solti transformed Covent Garden into an internationally acclaimed company. His first impressions, he later said, were that “there was no one there who knew anything at all about how to run an opera house.” He did. He brought pride in local singers, gave performances of operas by Britten and Tippett, and engaged local directing talents amongst many other achievements.

Outside the opera house he received accolades for his performances of Elgar. “The first foreign-born conductor to grasp the essence of Elgar. A blast of fresh air,” said one critic as the Hungarian maestro brought his trademark briskness but also depth of feeling to Elgar’s two symphonies. Music that in lesser hands can be played at a quasi-religious trudge! Solti made it known that as part of his preparation of the score he’d studied Elgar’s own recordings closely.

Solti put down roots in the UK. In 1971 he was knighted and in 1972 took British nationality. When his time at Covent Garden came to an end he said, “You keep telling me what I have done for England. Look what England has done for me.”

“My dear, thank you very much. I was conducting”

During his London years, Solti met his 2nd wife, the BBC TV host Valerie Pitts, in unusual circumstances.

Assigned to interview him about his Covent Garden Ring Cycle one Friday night in his rooms at the Savoy Hotel, she told the maestro “I’m not awfully good on opera. I saw a frightful production in Frankfurt – Elektra, I think. It was horrid.”

As Lady Solti recalled later, “there was a terrible pause, then Solti’s brown eyes twinkled. ‘My dear, thank you very much. I was conducting.’”

Solti adored his wife and two daughters, Gabrielle and Claudia, who were born “when I was old enough to be a grandfather.” Holding them as newborn babies, he confided “was the closest I ever came to a religious experience.”

“The fastest baton in the West”

In 1969 Solti embarked on a remarkable twenty-two years at the helm of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He wasn’t the orchestra’s first choice and wasn’t widely known in America when he took over, but it was an investment that was richly rewarded.

The orchestra had lost some of the glory it had enjoyed during the tenure of Fritz Reiner and Solti’s remit was to restore it. And he did, and more. The orchestra had a long association with German music as did Solti and their performances of Wagner, Mahler and Strauss had few equals. Solti’s insatiable appetite for new scores also meant he’d add at least two to the orchestra’s season every year. Time magazine dubbed him “The fastest baton in the west.”

During his long tenure he raised the orchestra’s standards, honed its virtuosity and profile, and everyone talked about the “Chicago sound” – big, bold and brassy. After Solti departed it was revealed to be the gleaming “Solti sound,” as locals realised he’d taken it with him. He expanded the orchestra’s repertoire and took the CSO into many a Decca recording session. The magic Chicago-Solti combo sold more than 5 million records! 

“This young man gives me hope”

Solti’s repertoire embraced all the major works of the operatic and symphonic canon. His interest was largely in the great classics. “For me as a conductor, modern music stops around 1950 with late Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Bartók. I don’t go much farther. I leave it to the next generation to explore after 1950.”

He spent hours meticulously preparing his scores as he said he had a poor visual memory and learnt every piece painfully and slowly. He never rested on his laurels, always insisting on new interpretations each time he returned to a familiar work. “Each time I do Beethoven symphonies, it is new. I am always changing. I don’t want to listen to my records – never – I do not want that.”

As a student in Budapest, Solti had had a few piano lessons with Béla Bartók. “He was in his mid-forties and his reputation was daunting, although he’d received little official recognition and was widely regarded as a raving radical; we music students knew how important he was and we revered him. We were fully aware there was an authentic genius teaching at our Academy.”

In 1938 when Bartók and his wife gave the Budapest premiere of his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, young Solti was asked to turn the pages for Mrs Bartók. “I loved the sound and smell of that music.”

Years later Solti was asked which of the countless composers he’d conducted, he admired most “I think it is Bartók. He had the aura of a holy man.”

Valerie Solti said “Bartók was his great hero because he was a man of courage, integrity and humanistic values. My husband thought that one should try to live one’s life as Bartok lived his.”

Richard Strauss too made a profound impression on Solti. He first met the composer in Munich in 1949 at the Staatsoper where Solti was conducting Der Rosenkavalier for the composer’s 85th birthday.

Later he was invited to Garmisch, where the nervous young Solti “was treated like a colleague. He gave me advice which guided me throughout my entire career, including not to get too involved with the music, but to stay somewhere outside it – not to lack passion but to be dispassionate in the execution. Good advice but not always easy for me.”

A few weeks later Strauss was dead, and Solti conducted the final trio from Der Rosenkavalier as Strauss had requested, at his funeral. “One after another, each singer broke down in tears and dropped out of the ensemble, but they recovered themselves and we all ended together. Frau Strauss turned into a broken, weeping old woman. Unable to live without her beloved Richard, she died not long after.”

“I don’t want to retire, because I would die. I love work and I love music.”

But Solti did die, suddenly in his sleep, on 5th September 1997, the same day as Mother Teresa and not long after Diana, Princess of Wales.

At the time of his death, his diary was full and there was an oversized score of the St John Passion on his desk, a work he was about to perform and record for the first time.

Happily, he’d returned to Hungary earlier in the year to record a program about his life with the BBC. In it he reminisces about his childhood, visits family graves, returns to his alma mater, the Liszt Academy, and Lake Balaton where he swam as a boy.

He is buried in Budapest alongside Béla Bartók. The inscription on his grave is one word: “Hazatert” (has come home.)

Mairi Nicolson presents Lunchtime Concert, The Opera Show and Sunday Opera on ABC Classic.