77 Facts About Georg Solti

Sir Georg Solti was a Hungarian-British orchestral and operatic conductor, known for his appearances with opera companies in Munich, Frankfurt and London, and as a long-serving music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Georg Solti's career was interrupted by the rise of the Nazis' influence on Hungarian politics and, being of Jewish background, he fled the increasingly harsh Hungarian anti-Jewish laws in 1938.

Georg Solti became an honorary citizen of the coastal holiday town of Castiglione della Pescaia, and a British citizen in 1972.

In 1969, Georg Solti became music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a post he held for 22 years.

Georg Solti conducted multiple recordings and high-profile international tours with the orchestra.

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Georg Solti relinquished the position in 1991 and became the orchestra's music director laureate, a position he held until his death.

Georg Solti recorded many works two or three times at various stages of his career, and was a prolific recording artist, making more than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets.

Georg Solti's Ring has twice been voted the greatest recording ever made, in polls for Gramophone magazine in 1999 and the BBC's Music Magazine in 2012.

Georg Solti was repeatedly honoured by the recording industry with awards throughout his career, including a record 31 Grammy Awards as a recording artist.

Georg Solti was the younger of the two children of Terez and Moricz "Mor" Stern, both of whom were Jewish.

Georg Solti renamed them after Solt, a small town in central Hungary.

Georg Solti enrolled at the Erno Fodor School of Music in Budapest at the age of ten, transferring to the more prestigious Franz Liszt Academy two years later.

Georg Solti studied under the first three, for piano, chamber music and composition respectively.

Some sources state that he studied with Kodaly, but in his memoirs Georg Solti recalled that Kodaly, whom he would have preferred, turned him down, leaving him to study composition first with Albert Siklos and then with Dohnanyi.

Georg Solti found that working as a repetiteur, coaching singers in their roles and playing at rehearsals, was a more fruitful preparation than Unger's classes for his intended career as a conductor.

In 1932 he went to Karlsruhe in Germany as assistant to Josef Krips, but within a year, Krips, anticipating the imminent rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, insisted that Georg Solti should go home to Budapest, where at that time Jews were not in danger.

Georg Solti went first to London, where he made his Covent Garden debut, conducting the London Philharmonic for a Russian ballet season.

Georg Solti hoped that Toscanini would help find him a post in the US.

Georg Solti was unable to do so, but Solti found work and security in Switzerland as vocal coach to the tenor Max Hirzel, who was learning the role of Tristan in Wagner's opera.

Georg Solti did not see his father again: Mor Stern died of diabetes in a Budapest hospital in 1943.

Georg Solti was reunited with his mother and sister after the war.

Georg Solti was appointed musical director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1946.

Georg Solti benefited from the encouragement of the elderly Richard Strauss, in whose presence he conducted Der Rosenkavalier.

Georg Solti signed for Decca Records, not as a conductor but as a piano accompanist.

Georg Solti made his first recording in 1947, playing Brahms's First Violin Sonata with the violinist Georg Kulenkampff.

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Georg Solti was insistent that he wanted to conduct, and Decca gave him his first recording sessions as a conductor later in the same year, with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra in Beethoven's Egmont overture.

In 1951 Georg Solti conducted at the Salzburg Festival for the first time, partly through the influence of Furtwangler, who was impressed by him.

In Munich Georg Solti achieved critical and popular success, but for political reasons his position at the State Opera was never secure.

The view persisted that a German conductor should be in charge; pressure mounted, and after five years Georg Solti accepted an offer to move to Frankfurt in 1952 as musical director of the Oper Frankfurt.

The city's opera house had been destroyed in the war, and Georg Solti undertook to build a new company and repertoire for its recently completed replacement.

Georg Solti conducted the symphony concerts given by the opera orchestra.

Georg Solti recruited many rising young American singers such as Claire Watson and Sylvia Stahlman, to the extent that the house acquired the nickname "Amerikanische Oper am Main".

Georg Solti believed he could never return to Hungary, by then under communist rule.

Georg Solti conducted in the Americas for the first time in 1952, giving concerts in Buenos Aires.

Culshaw believed Georg Solti to be "the great Wagner conductor of our time", and was determined to record the four operas of Der Ring des Nibelungen with Georg Solti and the finest Wagner singers available.

Apart from Arabella in 1957, in which he substituted when Karl Bohm withdrew, Georg Solti had made no complete recording of an opera until the sessions for Das Rheingold, the first of the Ring tetralogy, in September and October 1958.

Georg Solti appeared with leading orchestras in New York, Vienna and Los Angeles, and at Covent Garden he conducted Der Rosenkavalier and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

In 1960 Georg Solti signed a three-year contract to be music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1962.

Georg Solti accepted an offer to become musical director of Covent Garden Opera Company, London.

Biographer Montague Haltrecht suggests that Georg Solti seized the breach of his Los Angeles contract as a convenient pretext to abandon the Philharmonic in favour of Covent Garden.

However, in his memoirs Georg Solti wrote that he wanted the Los Angeles position very much indeed.

Georg Solti originally considered holding both posts in tandem, but later acknowledged that he had had a lucky escape, as he could have done justice to neither post had he attempted to hold both simultaneously.

Georg Solti took up the musical directorship of Covent Garden in August 1961.

Georg Solti was an advocate of opera in the vernacular, and he promoted the development of British and Commonwealth singers in the company, frequently casting them in his recordings and important productions in preference to overseas artists.

Georg Solti demonstrated his belief in vernacular opera with a triple bill in English of L'heure espagnole, Erwartung and Gianni Schicchi.

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Some press reviews were strongly critical; Georg Solti was so wounded by a review in The Times of his conducting of The Marriage of Figaro that he almost left Covent Garden in despair.

The chorus and orchestra were strengthened, and in the interests of musical and dramatic excellence, Georg Solti secured the introduction of the stagione system of scheduling performances, rather than the traditional repertory system.

In 1970, Georg Solti led the company to Germany, where they gave Don Carlos, Falstaff and Victory, a new work by Richard Rodney Bennett.

Georg Solti moved into the Savoy Hotel, where not long afterwards he met Valerie Pitts, a British television presenter, sent to interview him.

Georg Solti's too was married, but after pursuing her for three years, Solti persuaded her to divorce her husband.

In 1967 Georg Solti was invited to become music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Georg Solti told the representatives of the orchestra that his commitments at Covent Garden made it impossible to give Chicago the eight months a year they sought.

Georg Solti suggested giving them three and a half months a year and inviting Carlo Maria Giulini to take charge for a similar length of time.

When Georg Solti accepted the orchestra's second invitation it was agreed that Giulini should be appointed to share the conducting.

Georg Solti concluded that it was essential to raise the orchestra's international profile.

Georg Solti ensured that it was engaged for many of his Decca sessions, and he and Giulini led it in a European tour in 1971, playing in ten countries.

Georg Solti is very tense at rehearsals, which makes us concentrate, but relaxed during the performance, which is a great asset to the orchestra.

Georg Solti introduced new works commissioned for the orchestra, such as Lutoslawski's Third Symphony, and Tippett's Fourth Symphony which was dedicated to Solti.

Georg Solti frequently programmed works by American composers, including Charles Ives and Elliott Carter.

Georg Solti made commercial recordings of seven of Shostakovich's fifteen symphonies.

In 1983 Georg Solti conducted for the only time at the Bayreuth Festival.

Georg Solti's conducting was praised, but illnesses and last-minute replacements of leading performers affected the standard of singing.

Georg Solti was invited to return to Bayreuth for the following season, but was unwell and withdrew on medical advice before the 1984 festival began.

Georg Solti regularly returned to Covent Garden as a guest conductor in the years after he relinquished the musical directorship, greeted with "an increasingly boisterous hero's welcome" .

Georg Solti died suddenly, in his sleep, on 5 September 1997 while on holiday in Antibes in the south of France.

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Georg Solti recorded throughout his career for the Decca Record Company.

Georg Solti made more than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets.

Georg Solti was one of the first conductors who came to international fame as a recording artist before being widely known in the concert hall or opera house.

In concerto recordings, Georg Solti conducted for, among others, Andras Schiff, Julius Katchen, Clifford Curzon, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Kyung-wha Chung.

Georg Solti's most celebrated recording was Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen made in Vienna, produced by Culshaw, between 1958 and 1965.

Georg Solti was awarded honorary citizenship from the coastal town of Castiglione della Pescaia, in Tuscany, a holiday destination particularly frequented by celebrities where he owned a holiday house and used to spend the summer holidays with his wife and daughters.

Furthermore, Georg Solti received a number of honours from Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Portugal and the US.

Georg Solti received honorary fellowships or degrees from the Royal College of Music and DePaul, Furman, Harvard, Leeds, London, Oxford, Surrey and Yale universities.

Record industry awards to Georg Solti included the Grand Prix Mondial du Disque and 31 Grammy Awards .

Georg Solti won more Grammys than any other recording artist, whether classical or popular.

Georg Solti's memoirs, written with the assistance of Harvey Sachs, were published the month after his death.

In 2012 a series of events under the banner of "Georg Solti @ 100" was announced, to mark the centenary of Georg Solti's birth.