Probably the best anecdotes from the music world concern conductors. They, more than composers or performers, are the hot center of comic interaction with musicians, composers, administrators, and audiences. They also often have epic rivalries with fellow conductors that give rise to exquisite putdowns. They are apt to display the prima donnaish caprices of star performers, the dictatorial lèse majesté of persons in charge of large aggregations, and the histrionic vanity of audience cynosures.

There are, to be sure, conductors whose public and private lives are modest, blameless, and unanecdotal, but they are rare. As his recent, posthumous Memoirs makes plain, Sir Georg Solti (1912–1997), a man of energy and ego, could not have been one of them.[1] Living and conducting to the ripe age of eighty-four, equally at home in the concert hall and opera house, and Hungarian to boot, he was a maestro of magnetic attractions and repulsions, and concomitant anecdotes. When you consider also his early and dramatic buffetings by history, his successive citizenships (Hungarian, German, and British), and his long tenures at the helms of far-flung orchestras operatic and symphonic, there was no way for comic or melodramatic incidents not to accrue around his persona.

He was born György Stern on October 21, 1912, in Buda, the sleepy town on the west bank of the Danube, as yet separate from Pest. With the outbreak of World War I, the family, which included his older sister, Lilly, moved to a provincial city, but by late 1918 they were back in exiguous quarters in Buda. Young Gyuri (the Hungarian for Georgie) had two fears: of uniforms, which “in Hungary always meant persecution,” and of rats, which infested the Sterns’ neighborhood. The father was an unsuccessful businessman, the mother a genius at making ends meet. Both were Jewish, the mother less orthodox than the father, but they never forced their son to practice their faith: “I did not rebel against it,” he writes, “but then, as today, I disliked organized religion.” In time to come, he changed his name to Solti.

He did not have much of a liberal education, but, even though he preferred soccer to practicing the piano (“there is something abnormal about children who like to practice instruments: they are either geniuses or, more often, completely untalented”), he did become a fine pianist, studying at the Liszt Academy under Bartók, Kodály, Dohnányi, about all of whom he has spirited comments. But his best teacher was Leó Weiner, a man so uncompromising that, even during a famine, he turned down canned chicken.

Solti was graduated from the academy “as a favor both to you and ourselves” and got a job as répétiteur at the Budapest Opera. Though mostly a pianist, he wangled his way into a little conducting despite anti-Semitic bylaws forbidding it. He had been, he says, “the best répétiteur ever … able to follow the worst singer to hell and back.” Working with famous guest conductors was useful; a single “Bene” from Toscanini gave him one of his greatest joys, and helped make him the first unconverted Jew to conduct at the Budapest Opera since Hungary became a nation. His debut was with a Figaro in 1938, almost ruined by the Jewish Almaviva, who, during the intermission, had heard the grim news of Hitler’s Anschluss of Austria.

At Antal Dorati’s invitation, Solti got to conduct some ballet in London, though, not speaking a word of English, he had his problems. Among other things, he conducted Carnaval at Schumann’s fast tempo indications and was advised to “get out before [the dancers] lynch you.” A new anti-Semitic law got him fired from the Budapest Opera; even so, he was glad he turned down an offer to tour Australia with the ballet company of Colonel de Basil in 1939. This was the first of many times in Solti’s life when he felt his actions “guided by what can best be described as a ‘guardian angel.’”

In August 1939, when Solti was twenty-six, a rich Jewish friend gave him money to travel to Lucerne, where Toscanini was conducting, and ask the maestro to help him find a job in America. His father took György to the train station and began to cry. The son assured him he’d be back in ten days; actually, they never saw each other again. Toscanini promised to help; moreover, a telegram from Mother instructed Solti: Don’t come home! He stayed in Zurich—which saved his life—for the next seven years.

He had a variety of odd jobs there, as pianist, piano teacher, or vocal coach, but he depended largely on the kindness of a few friends; for the Swiss in general, he has few warm words. Indeed, the words in Memoirs become more pointed here: a singer he coaches has “a voice like a castrated frog”; Hindemith, whom he meets, “seemed more like a Swiss banker than a composer.” He’s as sharp as the knife in a Swiss kitchen with which he severely cut one of his fingers. Since then, other than fixing himself two cups of morning coffee, he made it a point “never to go near a kitchen if I can help it.”

In Zurich, Solti married his first wife, Hedi Oechsli. The daughter of a chemistry professor, she taught him much: “I was a late developer, really quite backward, and in some respects neither intelligent nor well educated … my mental level was more like that of a twelve-year-old.” Above all, she encouraged his self-education through reading, a habit that stuck. Finally a job offer came from Stuttgart, which he first accepted, then dropped when a better one came from Munich. This was just the right time for a young conductor because the major maestros—Furtwängler, Karajan, Knappertsbusch, Krauss—had not yet been de-Nazified. To be sure, living was hard in postwar Germany. At one of those unheated Munich orchestra rehearsals, beads of sweat on Solti’s forehead froze into icicles. At another time, Solti was so undernourished that he could make it to his fifth-floor walk-up only by being pushed by the gigantic orchestra porter.

In Munich, he earned guarded praise from Furtwängler; he did indeed have wonderful singers to work with, and learned a lot on the job. He got to know Strauss, who invited him to his house and gave him useful advice. “Why do you thrash about so when conducting?” Strauss asked. (The German fuchteln is stronger than “wave about,” as Solti translates.) The composer, though almost blind and deaf, still conducted beautifully with utmost economy of gesture. Solti regrets having been too shy to ask some important questions; by their next projected meeting, Strauss was dead. Solti conducted at his funeral.

By 1951, the Munich powers wanted a German conductor. The aptly named Culture Minister Hundshammer offered a markedly less favorable contract. Solti accepted but on a street corner ran into Harry Buckwitz, a stage director and newly appointed manager of the Frankfurt Opera, who agreed to take him on as his music director. So Solti resigned from the Bavarian State Opera. Before Frankfurt, though, he accepted a guest appearance in Buenos Aires, adored his first airplane trip, and had amusing adventures during an anti-Perón revolt. In Dakar, on the way back, he almost lost his passport in the men’s room, which, for the stateless person he then was, would have spelled disaster.

Rudolf Kempe having taken over in Munich, Solti flew directly to Frankfurt, which he perceived as a step down. He notes: “I could not have imagined I was about to begin one of the happiest and most productive periods of my life.” To add to his happiness, he had signed a contract with Decca (London) records, with which he stayed to the end, making over 250 recordings.

Just outside Frankfurt, the Soltis had their first house, which Hedi tastefully decorated. There were two dogs and a faithful Hungarian retainer, Frau Zador, who remained a friend for life. For recreation, Solti played volleyball and bridge. His sister visited from Hungary, but, to his eternal regret, he let her return there to live out a precarious existence. In Frankfurt, it was the critic Theodor Adorno who converted Solti to Mahler and Bruckner, whose works became two of the conductor’s specialties. He also taught him to appreciate such a piece as Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron (which the book consistently misspells as “Aaron”).

The American authorities asked Solti to give up his Hungarian citizenship (Hungary having gone Communist), and for some years he was stateless until Germany kindly granted him its citizenship. For this, he remained grateful even after he became a British subject. Thus he remained, upon being knighted, Sir Georg rather than Sir George.

He made his first American guest appearance in San Francisco, where he admired what Pierre Monteux had done for the orchestra. In Chicago, he conducted at Ravinia, where passing trains obtrude, and which Beecham called the only railway station with its own symphony orchestra. But the powerful—and ignorant—critic Claudia Cassidy, who harmed many, prevented Solti from being hired by the Lyric Opera Company. He also conducted in New York, prompting some remarks about Bernstein, whom Solti takes to task for relaxing discipline by encouraging orchestra members to call him Lenny.

Solti did not get along with the New York and Vienna Philharmonics, but admits that this was partly his fault: “I had not yet learned that … one’s first task is not to stamp one’s own personality on everything… . Today, if an orchestra gives me something better than what I had in mind, I … gratefully adopt it, but [then] I did not understand such things.” But I wonder when —and whether—Solti ever fully learned this lesson. His clashes with strong artistic personalities are well known. He mentions in the book, with regret, never having got on with Jon Vickers and Giorgio Strehler, but he does not mention his extremely shabby dealing with the great Swedish tenor Jussi Björling, which is related in great and heartbreaking detail in the biography Jussi, by Anna-Lisa Björling and Andrew Farkas. Norman Lebrecht, in The Maestro Myth, quotes a singer on Solti’s “streak of magnificent selfishness,” and even Birgit Nilsson, who got on excellently with Solti, admitted, “He must have his own way.”

As with Strauss, Solti had only one meeting with Stravinsky, and again feels that he wasted a golden opportunity to ask pertinent questions. Meeting once more with Bruno Walter in California, he allowed himself to be persuaded to accept the conductorship at Covent Garden: “The English will love you … but you will hate the climate.” And so it was, though it took Solti a while to hit it off with David Webster, the Royal Opera House’s manager, and overcome poor reviews, as when Peter Heyworth wrote that Solti conducted the Rosenkavalier waltzes as if written for lame ducks. Meanwhile he was also hired as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic (he would have commuted between L.A. and London), but the meddlesomeness of Dorothy Chandler, the chairman of the board, who hired Zubin Mehta as assistant conductor without consulting Solti, made him quit, even though he liked Mehta.

He had had nine happy years in Frankfurt, when the general manager Harry Buckwitz himself said, “You’re too good for us,” and urged him to move on. In London, Thomas Beecham would have had some sarcastic comments—apropos Rafael Kubelik, he remarked unjustly that he wondered why Britain needed second-rate foreign conductors when it had plenty of second-rate British ones—but by the time Solti arrived at Covent Garden, Sir Thomas was dead. One of the first stage directors Solti worked with was Sir John Gielgud, and they got on splendidly, even though the heavy-accented Hungarian was intimidated by Gielgud’s gorgeous English.

Solti introduced a new system of programming—two or three seasonal operas with talent booked three years in advance— much needed in this jet age with singers whizzing hither and yon. He did not immediately click with Benjamin Britten, but eventually did so; yet here again he repeats his pattern of insufficient discussion with composers about their works. His first La Forza del destino at Covent Garden was a disaster, including Carlo Bergonzi’s wig coming off with his hat, but things duly improved, even if one critic described his Figaro as “a skater skimming over the surface of the music.” A falling out with Rudolf Bing, who sided with his tenor Jon Vickers, prevented Solti from conducting at the Met.

Soon after the purchase of a house in Roccamara, on Italy’s west coast, where the conductor was to spend some of his best times relaxing or studying scores, the twenty-year-old marriage of the Soltis began to unravel. The problem, it seems, “was a subtle psychological one: Hedi could not accept me as an adult. For her, I remained the overgrown Hungarian wunderkind … who had to be told how to behave in society and who could never be allowed to make his own choices in any sphere except the musical one.” Well, perhaps so. The result: a difficult divorce, but an amicable parting. A few months later, in September 1964, Valerie Pitts, a TV journalist twenty-five years his junior, came to interview Solti, and, not much later, married him despite parental disapproval. It was to be a happy union that produced two daughters and lasted until Solti’s death.

There were minor contretemps at Covent Garden. The highly realistic orgy scene in Moses und Aron, as staged by Peter Hall, upset the general manager David Webster and (for different reasons) even Solti, but the public loved the nude women and the blood. Maria Callas enraged Solti by refusing to sing, beyond the gala, the three other scheduled performances of Tosca, but he did not realize that she was vocally at the end of her tether. Incidentally, when Solti and Webster offered Callas Lulu, her comment was, “Berg? Terrible music!” She refused; probably just as well.

Like most prima donnas, Solti was not good at taking criticism; he did not read unfavorable reviews, though this took “a great deal of self-discipline.” Typical is his comment on Andrew Porter, who, Solti writes, “never quite decided whether to like me or hate me.” Solti, apparently, could not understand that it isn’t about loving or hating him, but about evaluating particular performances, which, by everyone, are variable.

Here it should be noted that, though Solti got along well with the English, he felt that they could not accept his not being an amateur. To them, he claims, professionalism is suspect, and he quotes a remark he attributes to Vaughan Williams: “Anything that is worth doing is worth doing badly.” But surely that is not a defense of poor performances, only a settling for less in difficult endeavors.

Be it said for Solti that he valued good singers, though more often if they were women. Birgit Nilsson, Anja Silja, Marie Collier, and Hans Hotter, among others, rate notable tributes. But he is equally outspoken about singers’ inadequacies. For the 1963 recording of The Ring, he had the splendid Nilsson, Hotter, and Windgassen. In 1983, he had to settle for a much lesser cast, and his comments are fascinating. They lead to pertinent observations about Bayreuth: nowadays you cannot cast The Ring, and Bayreuth should produce operas by other German composers as well, so as to regenerate itself—“The Wagner Festival as such has outlived its time.”

After ten years in London, Solti accepted the post for which we know him best at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But for all his twenty-two-year tenure there, he did not give up his British citizenship, which would have meant, let us recall, the loss of his knighthood. The Chicago story is fascinating, but I must summarize it with how Solti assessed his three main achievements there: raising the musical standards of the CSO so as to earn international respect, making the city proud of its orchestra, and gaining financial security for the musicians even in their retirement.

Solti delivers himself of some eminently sensible judgments. Thus he condemns the distortion of operas by modern stage directors as “abominations,” and deplores “that the conductors of my generation have not had the courage to stand up” to them. Yet I wonder whether he himself displayed enough of that courage. He shrewdly notes that the subscription series so popular with American orchestras are misguided, making some people attend innovative works they dislike merely because of season tickets, while keeping out many who would appreciate them. Hence so many bored and restlessly noisy audiences, and disturbing early departures. Wise, too, is the observation that an orchestra is made up not so much of its hundred players as of the fifteen first desks who lead them. Again, the smart rejection of the current mania for period instruments, “difficult to tune when modern instruments can be easily and properly tuned.” It may not be indisputable that, as he claims, “it was generally accepted that Solti and the CSO were the best musical team in the United States,” but neither is it a statement easily dismissed.

Finally, Solti ended—sadly—his long stay in Chicago, to become a free agent working less but stimulatingly in diverse places, each new orchestra, however, presenting problems of its own. In the closing section of his book, Solti describes his difficult leavetaking, and his refusal to take sides as to who should succeed him, Abbado or Barenboim, with the orchestra ultimately voting for the latter. But in his A Life in Music, Barenboim claims that already in 1983 Solti told him “he felt that I would be his natural successor.” I am inclined to believe this: even enlightened autocrats prefer to be followed by obvious inferiors.

The last forty or so pages contain, besides the account of the final years (e.g., Karajan’s keeping Solti out of Salzburg until he himself was getting too enfeebled), a compendium of Solti’s provocative views on the composers he conducted, on what he liked or disliked about their various works, and, best of all, on how to conduct them. He notes also that, though lacking the visual memory of a Toscanini or Karajan, and the improvisatory skills of a Furtwängler or Nikisch, he was an architectural conductor, who constructed a performance from careful study of details and their assemblage toward a grand design; that, in short, he could “make any orchestra, good or bad, perform to the best of its abilities.” That seems to me—at least when he was in good form, and the music congenial to him—a fair evaluation.

Solti is no doubt right also on the need for a true opera conductor to put in an apprenticeship as a vocal coach, and that “we conductors should always remember our roles as interpreters; we are there to serve with the best of our technical abilities the wishes of the composers, who are the creators.” Beyond that, I salute the book’s liminal remarks where Solti calls himself “lucky to have grown up in Hungary, a country that lives and breathes music.” The luck motif recurs, charmingly and touchingly, as a sort of rondo at book’s end: “I have had an enormously lucky life. I have said many times, and believe more every day, that I have a guardian angel who guides me and protects me. Looking back, there have been disappointments and unachieved ambitions, but all in all, I have had a wonderful time.”

That wonderful time is well conveyed by this concise and entertaining book, whose numerous racy anecdotes I could not begin to touch on. Memoirs is written in the rousingly joyous style with which Solti conducted, and seems to have obtained good assistance from Harvey Sachs, Solti’s collaborator on it. Yet Sachs might have circumvented such misuses as fortuitously for fortunately, and enormity for enormousness. Also a lapsus calami, or thalami, that has someone singing Florestan in Die Walküre, rather than in Fidelio, where he belongs. Such trifles aside, Solti would not have ranked his memoirs among his disappointments. For readers, only repeated references to projects Sir Georg did not live to realize should prove disappointing.

And one further, small blemish. The book ends with a tiny but moving afterword, in which Solti’s widow and daughters report on Solti’s death and their loss. Solti is referred to as Papa by daughters Gabrielle and Claudia; and by wife Valerie as Gyuri, which, as noted, is Hungarian for Georgie. But the guardian angel, having, alas, no jurisdiction over the printer’s devil, allows the nickname to emerge as “Gyrui.” Otherwise, this is a handsomely produced book, about which Sir Georg might have invoked the words of one of his favorite singers, Sir Geraint Evans, on the last Falstaff he sang under Solti’s baton. In Evans’s memoir, A Knight at the Opera, we read: “Everything came together just as I always hoped it would … the nearest to perfection that I could hope to achieve.”

Notes
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Memoirs, by Sir Georg Solti, with Harvey Sachs; Knopf, 258 pages, $25.95. Go back to the text.