(b Budapest, 21 Oct 1912; d Antibes, 5 Sept 1997). British conductor of Hungarian birth. After giving his first piano recital at 12 he studied at the Liszt Academy of Music, Budapest, where his teachers included Dohnányi and Bartók for the piano, and Kodály for composition. After beginning his career as a pianist and accompanist he joined the Budapest Opera as a répétiteur, worked with Toscanini at the 1936 and 1937 Salzburg Festivals and made his début as a conductor at Budapest in 1938 with Le nozze di Figaro, on the night the Nazis marched into Austria. As a Jew he faced restricted professional activity in Hungary and left in 1939, spending the war years in Switzerland. Unable to gain a labour permit for work as a conductor there, he returned to the piano and won the 1942 Geneva International Piano Competition. In 1946 he was invited by the American military authorities to conduct Fidelio at Munich. This led to his appointment as musical director of the Staatsoper there (1946–52) and the foundation of the company’s postwar repertory and reputation under his direction. In Munich he worked with Strauss, conducting Der Rosenkavalier in the composer’s presence. A recording contract with Decca followed, beginning an association that lasted until his death. He made his first recordings in 1947, as a pianist with Kulenkampff in Beethoven and Mozart violin sonatas. He first went to London to record with the LPO, and made his concert début with that orchestra in 1949. He began to appear in other European cities and in South America, and moved to Frankfurt as Generalmusikdirektor (1952–61), directing the city concerts as well as the opera.
Solti appeared at the Edinburgh Festival in 1952 as a guest conductor with the Hamburg Opera, and the following year made his American début with the San Francisco Opera. He conducted his only Glyndebourne opera (Don Giovanni) in 1954, and in 1959 made his Covent Garden opera début with Der Rosenkavalier; this led to his appointment as musical director there for ten years from 1961, the longest tenure since Costa’s. He announced his intention of making Covent Garden ‘quite simply, the best opera house in the world’, and in the opinion of many he succeeded. The high standards of orchestral discipline were praised. Asserting his dynamic personality over the orchestra, he dramatically raised standards and hackles at the same time; the musicians called him ‘the screaming skull’ in response to his autocratic manner and the excited stream of guttural exclamations from the podium. Critics (and segments of the audience who routinely booed his Covent Garden performances) despaired of his relentless drive in Mozart and Verdi, although his Wagner and Strauss gradually found more favour. His mid-1960s Ring cycles were a triumph. While he left most of the modern repertory to his assistant, Edward Downes, he did introduce over 20 new productions to Covent Garden, including the British première of Moses und Aron.
Solti’s work was recognized by the award of an honorary CBE in 1968; he was advanced to KBE in 1971, and became entitled to the title Sir Georg on taking British nationality the next year. In 1974 he was made a Commandeur of the Légion d’Honneur.
London lured him from the Dallas SO where he had been music director (1960–61), despite his desire to concentrate his efforts on symphony concerts. He fulfilled this goal by becoming musical director of the Chicago SO in 1969. While he maintained his home in Europe, as music director of the Orchestre de Paris (1972–5), music adviser to the Paris Opéra (1971–3), principal conductor (1979–81) of the LPO, and with regular appearances with the Vienna Staatsoper and (with an increasingly boisterous hero’s welcome) at Covent Garden, Solti dedicated most of the next 22 years to his fruitful relationship with Chicago, taking the orchestra on tour in the USA and abroad to huge critical acclaim and recording with it virtually the entire standard Austro-German orchestral repertory.
His podium personality, exuberant and forceful, was clearly imprinted upon his music-making as he snarled and ferociously stabbed his baton. Critics found it both glorious and vulgar but never dull, and he always got what he wanted. It became a cliché to say he ‘mellowed’ as he got older, but his performances remained thrilling right to the end. In his 70s he was still aggravating critics with a new Bayreuth Ring with Peter Hall, and in his 80s his performances and recordings of Strauss, Mozart and Verdi’s Otello were still bold, despite what some critics perceived as a sunnier outlook. He died only days before he was due to conduct the Verdi Requiem at the Proms, and had a busy schedule into the 21st century. His legacy includes over 250 recordings for Decca (with 45 complete operas) and 32 Grammy Awards, more than any other classical or popular performer. Recording Salome and then the first complete studio Ring (1958–64), with John Culshaw as producer, he became a pioneer in the use of stereo techniques to simulate the theatrical dimensions of opera. Outstanding among his other recordings is a fine Mahler cycle (made with the Chicago SO), including a truly colossal Symphony no.8. Shortly before his death he published a memoir, Solti on Solti (London, 1997)
L. Ayre: ‘Georg Solti’, Audio & Record Review, i/1 (1961–2), 27–9 [with discography by F.F. Clough and G.J. Cuming]
J. Culshaw: Ring Resounding (London, 1967)
R. Osborne: ‘Georg Solti’, Records and Recording, xiv/5 (1970–71), 46 only
B. Magee: ‘Solti’s Ten Years’, Opera, xxii (1971), 576–80
A. Blyth: ‘Sir Georg Solti Talks to Alan Blyth’, Gramophone (1972–3), 659–60
W.B. Furlong: Season with Solti: a Year in the Life of the Chicago Symphony (New York, 1974)
P. Robinson: Solti (London, 1979) [incl. discography by B. Surtees]
ARTHUR JACOBS/JOSÉ BOWEN