Georg Solti
Sir Georg Solti, KBE (October 21, 1912 - September 5, 1997) was a world-renowned Hungarian-British orchestral and operatic conductor associated in later life with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He is regarded as one the supreme practitioners in the art of conducting.
After a promising career in his native Hungary, Solti spent the war years of WWII in Swiss exile due to his Jewish parentage. There, he won acclaim as a pianist but could not pursue his conducting career. After the war, he had several successful appointments as a conductor in Germany, leading to his tenure as music director of the Royal Opera House in London during the 60s, where he introduced British audiences to modern composers and launched his pioneering and enduring partnership with Decca Records.
Solti directed the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1969 until 1991 and continued conducting it until his death. He also worked with several prestigious European orchestras and created a vast corpus of studio recordings, resulting an a largest number of Grammy Awards ever given to one person.
In 1996, Solti was honored with a lifetime achievement award in from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He died suddenly in 1997, shortly before what would have been his one-thousandth performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Biography
Early years
Solti was born György Stern to a Jewish family in Budapest. His father later Germanized young György's given name to Georg and changed the family name to Solti to shield his son from growing anti-semitism.
As a boy, Solti learned the piano and studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music. It was at the Liszt Academy that he met the iconic Hungarian composer, Bela Bartok. Upon hearing an orchestra performance conducted by Erich Kleiber when he was 13 years old, Solti decided that conducting would be his life. He would also study with other important Hungarian musicians, including Zoltan Kodaly and Erno von Dohnanyi.
By 1935, Solti was gaining recognition as a conductor. He served as an assistant conductor to the Italian mega-maestro, Arturo Toscanini in 1936 and 1937 and made his debut at the Budapest Opera in 1938 with The Marriage of Figaro. In 1939, with German invasion imminent, he fled Hungary, knowing that his Jewish ancestry would endanger both his career and his life.
War years and aftermath
He moved to neutral Switzerland, where he continued working as a pianist but had limited opportunities to develop his conducting career. From 1939 and through the war years he remained exiled in Swizterland. Remaining in Switzerland until 1946 he developed his piano technique and won first prize the Geneva International Piano Competition. It was while he was in Zurich that Solti he met his first wife, Hedi Oechsli.
After World War II he traveled to Germany to seek conducting opportunities, only to find the country in virtual ruins. During this time Solti was invited by the American military government to conduct Beethoven's Fidelio in Munich. He was then appointed music director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, where he gave the German premiere of Paul Hindemith's opera Mathis der Maler, which had been banned under the Nazi regime. He also directed the Frankfurt Opera. Solti's numerous successes in Germany would also lead to opportunities in other major European opera houses and festivals.
In 1947 he signed his first recording contract with the prestigious Decca label, a relationship that would span 50 years, making it the longest conductor/record-label relationship ever. While at Decca, he made more than 300 recordings, including over 40 operas. In 1951, he made his debut at the Salzburg Festival, conducting Mozart's Idomeneo.
London years and knighthood
From 1961 to 1971, Solti served as the music director of the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London. In this period, he began to introduce British audiences to contemporary opera. He was also devoted to the recording of modern English composers, including the four symphonies of Sir Michael Tippett, perhaps England's most notable twentieth-century composer.
During his tenure at Covent Garden, he achieved international fame for his performances of Richard Strauss's opera Die Frau ohne Schatten, the British premiere of Arnold Schoenberg's ground-breaking atonal opera Moses and Aron, and Richard Wagner's eipc "Ring Cycle," Der Ring des Nibelungen. He also recorded the entire Ring Cycle with the Vienna Philharmonic, a historic recoding project that required seven years to complete.
Meanwhile, Solti's first marriage ended in divorce. His second marriage was to Valerie Pitts, a British television presenter, whom he met when she was assigned to interview him. They had two daughters. In 1972, he became a naturalized citizen of the United Kingdom. He had been awarded an honorary Order of the British Empire (knighthood) in 1971, and was known as "Sir Georg Solti" after his naturalization.
During his time in England, Solti was a great supporter and mentor to many young musicians, including the fiery Hungarian soprano Sylvia Sass, with whom he recorded Mozart's Don Giovanni and Bartok's brooding one act opera Bluebeard's Castle.
Chicago Symphony and later years
Solti was music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) from 1969 until 1991, and he was made the first and only Music Director Laureate in that orchestra's history. He also led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on numerous international tours including a performance at the famed Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow.
During the same period, he was music director of the Orchestre de Paris from 1972 until 1975. From 1979 until 1983, he was principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Despite this energetic international schedule, Solti was as enthusiastic making music in the recording studio as he was in the opera house or concert hall. His long and productive partnership with the legendary producer John Culshaw at Decca continued through his tenure with the CSO. In addition to the first-ever studio recording of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, groundbreaking products of this partnership included studio recordings of the operas of Richard Strauss. Both the Strauss and Wagner recordings have been remastered and released on CD, and they are still praised for their musicianship and expert production values.
Solti's performances and recordings of works by Verdi, Mahler and Bartók were also widely admired. Using both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, as well as the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, he recorded an extensive symphonic repertoire including the complete symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Elgar, Schumann, and Mahler.
He continued to add new works to his repertoire in the latter days of his career, voicing particular enthusiasm for the music of Shostakovich, whom he admitted he failed to appreciate fully during the composer's lifetime. Solti never truly retired, and his sudden death in 1997 meant that several years of planned performances and recording projects would never be realized. In total, Solti conducted 999 performances with the CSO. Performance number 1,000 was scheduled to be in October 1997, around the time of his eighty-fifth birthday.
According to his last wish, he was buried in Hungarian soil. After a state funeral, his body was placed beside that of Béla Bartók, his one-time tutor and mentor. Solti co-wrote his memoirs with Harvey Sachs, published in the UK as Solti on Solti and in the USA as Memoirs. The book appeared in the month after his death.
Legacy
Sir Georg Solti was one of several important Hungarian conductors whose talents and leadership skill helped shape the American orchestra landscape throughout the twentieth century. These important conductor/orchestra relationships included Fritz Reiner/Chicago Symphony, Artur Nikisch and George Szell/Cleveland Orchestra, Anton Seidl/New York Philharmonic, Eugene Ormandy/Philadelphia Orchestra and Antal Dorati/Minnesota Orchestra and Detroit Symphony. In 1988 we was named "Musician of the Year" by Musical America Magazine.
Solti's tenure with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was marked by numerous international successes. His recorded legacy is one of the most significant aspects of his career. Like Herbert von Karajan, he was one of first conductors to seize upon the importance of recording technology as a meaningful aspect of contemporary musical life.
Solti holds the record for having received the most Grammy awards. He personally won 31 Grammys and is listed for 38 Grammys (six went to his engineer and one to a soloist). He was nominated an additional 74 times before his death in 1997. He was honored with a lifetime achievement award in 1996 from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.
The City of Chicago renamed the block of East Adams Street adjacent to Symphony Center as "Sir Georg Solti Place" in his memory.
Awards and Recognition
| Preceded by: Hans Knappertsbusch |
General Music Director, Bavarian State Opera 1946 – 1952 |
Succeeded by: Rudolf Kempe |
| Preceded by: Paul Kletzki |
Music Director, Dallas Symphony Orchestra 1961–1962 |
Succeeded by: Donald Johanos |
| Preceded by: Rafael Kubelík |
Music Director, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden 1961 – 1971 |
Succeeded by: Colin Davis |
| Preceded by: Irwin Hoffman |
Music Director, Chicago Symphony Orchestra 1969 – 1991 |
Succeeded by: Daniel Barenboim |
| Preceded by: Herbert von Karajan |
Music Director, Orchestre de Paris 1972 – 1975 |
Succeeded by: Daniel Barenboim |
| Preceded by: Bernard Haitink |
Principal Conductor, London Philharmonic Orchestra 1979–1983 |
Succeeded by: Klaus Tennstedt |
Also known as "The Screaming Skull" by orchestra players.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- Solti, Georg, "Memoirs" A Cappella Books, with Harvey Sachs, Chicago Review Press International, Chicago, IL, 1998 ISBN 1-58652-337-8
- Robinson, Paul E., "Sir Georg Solti: His Life and Music," Copyright by iUniverse, 2006 ISBN 13-987-0-595-39953-6
