Sir Georg Solti KBE (born György Stern; October 21, 1912 – September 5, 1997) was a Hungarian-British conductor known for leading orchestras and opera companies in Munich, Frankfurt, and London. He also served as the long-time music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Born in Budapest, he studied music there with Béla Bartók, Leó Weiner, and Ernő Dohnányi. In the 1930s, he worked as a rehearsal assistant at the Hungarian State Opera and performed at the Salzburg Festival with Arturo Toscanini. His career was interrupted when the Nazis gained power in Hungary. Because he was Jewish, he left Hungary in 1938 to escape harsh laws against Jewish people. After conducting a season of Russian ballet in London, he moved to Switzerland during World War II. There, he could not conduct, so he earned money by playing the piano.
After the war, Solti became the musical director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1946. In 1952, he moved to the Oper Frankfurt, where he led the company for nine years. He became a citizen of West Germany in 1953. In 1961, he was appointed musical director of the Covent Garden Opera Company in London. During his 10 years there, he improved the company’s standards to international levels. The company was later given the title "the Royal Opera." He became an honorary citizen of Castiglione della Pescaia and a British citizen in 1972.
In 1969, Solti became the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a role he held for 22 years. He conducted many recordings and toured internationally with the orchestra. In 1991, he stepped down from the position and became the orchestra’s music director laureate, a title he held until his death. During his time as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s eighth music director, he also led the Orchestre de Paris from 1972 to 1975 and the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 1979 to 1983.
Solti was known for his passionate performances in his early years. Over time, his conducting style became more refined. He recorded many works multiple times throughout his career and created more than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets. His most famous recording is Decca’s complete version of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, made between 1958 and 1965. This recording was voted the greatest ever made in polls by Gramophone magazine in 1999 and the BBC’s Music Magazine in 2012. Solti won 31 Grammy Awards from 1963 to 1998, making him the most-awarded recording artist until Beyoncé surpassed his record in 2023.
Life and career
Solti was born György Stern on Maros utca, in the Hegyvidék district of the Buda side of Budapest. He was the younger of two children of Teréz (née Rosenbaum) and Móricz "Mor" Stern, both of whom were Jewish. After World War I, it became common in Hungary for people with German-sounding last names to change them to Hungarian ones. The government led by Admiral Horthy passed laws requiring public workers with foreign-sounding names to change their names. Mor Stern, a self-employed merchant, did not change his own name but decided to change his children’s names. He chose the name Solt, after a small town in central Hungary. His son’s first name, György, was already a Hungarian name and remained unchanged.
Solti described his father as "a kind, sweet man who trusted everyone. He shouldn’t have, but he did. Jews in Hungary were very patriotic. In 1914, when war began, my father used most of his money to buy war bonds to support the country. By the time the bonds were paid back, they were worthless." Mor Stern was religious, but his son was not as religious. Later in life, Solti said, "I often upset him because I never stayed in the synagogue for more than 10 minutes." Teréz Stern came from a musical family and encouraged her older daughter, Lilly, to sing and her son, György, to play piano. Solti remembered, "I made many mistakes, but it was valuable experience for an opera conductor. I learned to swim with her." He was not serious about practicing piano: "My mother kept telling me to practice, but what 10-year-old wants to play piano when he could be playing football?"
At age 10, Solti enrolled at the Ernő Fodor School of Music in Budapest. Two years later, he moved to the more famous Franz Liszt Academy. At 12, he heard Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony conducted by Erich Kleiber, which inspired him to become a conductor. His parents could not afford to pay for his music education, and his wealthy uncles did not think music was a good career. From age 13, Solti paid for his education by teaching piano lessons.
The Franz Liszt Academy had many famous Hungarian musicians, including Béla Bartók, Leó Weiner, Ernő Dohnányi, and Zoltán Kodály. Solti studied piano, chamber music, and composition with the first three. Some sources say he also studied with Kodály, but in his memoirs, Solti wrote that Kodály refused to teach him. Instead, he studied composition first with Albert Siklós and later with Dohnányi. Not all teachers were famous; Solti remembered his conducting class with Ernő Unger as unpleasant. "He taught us to use stiff wrist movements. I took the class for two years, but it took me five years of real conducting experience to unlearn what he taught me."
After graduating from the academy in 1930, Solti worked at the Hungarian State Opera as a répétiteur, helping singers prepare for performances. This job was more helpful for his future career as a conductor than his earlier classes. In 1932, he went to Germany as an assistant to Josef Krips. Krips, worried about the rise of Hitler and the Nazis, told Solti to return to Budapest, where Jews were safer at the time. Other Jewish and anti-Nazi musicians also moved to Budapest. Solti worked with Otto Klemperer, Fritz Busch, and Kleiber. Before Austria fell under Nazi control, Solti assisted Arturo Toscanini at the 1937 Salzburg Festival.
After working as a répétiteur in Budapest and gaining recognition from Toscanini, Solti conducted his first opera, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, on March 11, 1938. That night, news arrived about the German invasion of Austria. Many Hungarians feared Hitler would invade Hungary next. He did not, but Horthy, to please the Nazis, passed anti-Semitic laws similar to the Nuremberg Laws, limiting Jewish people from working in certain jobs. Solti’s family encouraged him to leave Hungary. He moved to London, where he conducted the London Philharmonic for a Russian ballet season. A reviewer in The Times wrote that his performance was "too violent" and "endangered the delicate atmosphere." Around this time, Solti changed his name from "György" to "Georg."
After his time in London, Solti went to Switzerland to find Toscanini, who was conducting in Lucerne. He hoped Toscanini would help him find a job in the U.S. Though Toscanini could not help, Solti found work as a vocal coach for tenor Max Hirzel, who was learning the role of Tristan in Wagner’s opera. During World War II, Solti stayed in Switzerland. He did not see his father again; Mor Stern died of diabetes in a Budapest hospital in 1943. After the war, Solti reunited with his mother and sister. In Switzerland, he could not get a permit to conduct, so he taught piano. After winning the 1942 Geneva International Piano Competition, he was allowed to give piano recitals but not to conduct. During his time in exile, he met Hedwig (Hedi) Oeschli, the daughter of a lecturer at Zürich University. They married in 1946. In his memoirs, Solti wrote, "She was very elegant and sophisticated. Hedi gave me a little grace and taught me good manners – although she never completely succeeded in this. She also helped me enormously in my career."
After the war, Solti’s career improved. In 1946, he was named musical director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. This was an unusual appointment for a young and inexperienced conductor, but many leading German conductors, like Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan, were banned from conducting until their denazification cases were completed. Under Solti’s leadership, the opera company rebuilt its repertoire and regained its former status. He received support from the elderly composer Richard Strauss, who let him conduct Der Rosenkavalier. Strauss gave him advice about conducting but avoided discussing his own music with him.
In addition to his work in Munich, Solti signed a recording contract with Decca Records in 1946, not as a conductor but as a piano accompanist. His first recording was in 1947, playing Brahms’s First Violin Sonata with violinist Georg Kulenkampff. He insisted on conducting, and Decca allowed him to conduct his first recording session later that year with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra performing Beethoven’s Egmont overture. Twenty years later, Solti said, "I’m sure it
Recordings
Solti recorded music for the Decca Record Company throughout his career. He created more than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets. During the 1950s and 1960s, Decca had a partnership with RCA Victor. Some of Solti's recordings were first released on the RCA label.
Solti was one of the first conductors to become famous as a recording artist before being widely known for live performances in concerts or opera houses. Gordon Parry, a Decca engineer who worked with Solti and Culshaw on the Ring recordings, said, "Many people say that John Culshaw was responsible for Solti's success. This is not true. He gave Solti the chance to show his talents."
Solti's first recordings were as a pianist who accompanied other musicians. He played in sessions in Zurich for violinist Georg Kulenkampff in 1947. Decca's top producer, Victor Olof, did not greatly admire Solti as a conductor (nor did Walter Legge, Olof's counterpart at EMI's Columbia Records). However, Olof's younger colleague and successor, Culshaw, respected Solti highly. As Culshaw and later James Walker produced his recordings, Solti's career as a recording artist grew from the mid-1950s.
Solti recorded with many famous orchestras, including the Berlin Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, London Philharmonic, London Symphony, and Vienna Philharmonic. Soloists in his operatic recordings included Birgit Nilsson, Joan Sutherland, Régine Crespin, Plácido Domingo, Gottlob Frick, Carlo Bergonzi, Kiri Te Kanawa, Ben Heppner, and José van Dam. In recordings of concertos, Solti conducted with musicians such as András Schiff, Julius Katchen, Clifford Curzon, Vladimir Ashkenazy, and Kyung-wha Chung.
Solti's most famous recording was Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, made in Vienna and produced by Culshaw between 1958 and 1965. This recording was voted the greatest ever made twice: once by readers of Gramophone magazine in 1999 and again by professional music critics for the BBC's Music Magazine in 2011. This recording is also heard in the film Apocalypse Now during the helicopter attack scene.
Honours and memorials
Honours given to Solti included the British CBE (honorary), in 1968, and an honorary knighthood (KBE), in 1971. This became an official knighthood when he became a British citizen in 1972, after which he was called Sir Georg Solti. He also received honorary citizenship from the coastal town of Castiglione della Pescaia in Tuscany, a popular vacation spot for celebrities. He owned a vacation home there and spent summers with his wife and daughters. In Castiglione, the Georg Solti Accademia and the main square in the town’s historic area are named after him. Solti also received honours from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal, and the United States. He was given honorary fellowships or degrees from the Royal College of Music and several universities, including DePaul, Furman, Harvard, Leeds, London, Oxford, Surrey, and Yale.
To celebrate his 75th birthday in 1987, a bronze statue of Solti by Dame Elisabeth Frink was placed in Lincoln Park, Chicago, outside the Lincoln Park Conservatory. It was first shown temporarily at the Royal Opera House in London. In 2006, the statue was moved to Grant Park in a new area called the Solti Garden, near Orchestra Hall in Symphony Center. In 1997, to mark the 85th anniversary of his birth, the City of Chicago renamed a section of East Adams Street near Symphony Center as "Sir Georg Solti Place" in his memory.
Record industry awards to Solti included the Grand Prix Mondial du Disque, won 14 times, and 31 Grammy Awards. He also received a special Trustees’ Grammy Award, shared with John Culshaw, for recording The Ring (1967), and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. He held the record for the most Grammy wins until Beyoncé tied it and later surpassed it in 2023. In September 2007, to honor the 10th anniversary of his death, Decca released a recording of his final concert.
After Solti’s death, his wife and daughters created the Solti Foundation to help young musicians. His memoirs, written with Harvey Sachs, were published the month after his death. His life was also shown in a 1997 film by Peter Maniura titled Sir Georg Solti: The Making of a Maestro.
In 2012, events under the theme "Solti @ 100" were held to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth. These included concerts in New York City and Chicago, and exhibitions in London, Chicago, Vienna, and New York City. That same year, Solti was inducted into the first Gramophone "Hall of Fame."
The Sir Georg Solti International Conductors’ Competition, held every two years in Frankfurt, is named in his honor.