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,