Solti's Final Masterpiece

...The magisterial tyrant addressed but a single word to him: bene, good...

...The following year, Solti was favored with the chance that he had long waited for: He would raise his baton at the Budapest Opera, in Mozart's Marriage of Figaro...

...So he prevailed on the conductor Josef Krips to take him as an assistant to the Karlsruhe Opera in Germany, where, after only a few months, a local Nazi newspaper inveighed against the Ostjude whom Krips had brought to town...

...She was "a Teutonic Callas," "hysterical, a wild beast in every sense...

...Conducting opportunities were plentiful in Germany, where American de-Nazification was in full flower and German conductors—including many of the world's most celebrat-ed—were banned from their own podiums...

...So, Solti had to pack his bags and retreat to Budapest...

...Solti quickly asserted his iron control over the company, demanding numerous and meticulous rehearsals, ruffling British reserve, and insisting on first-class musicianship...

...Solti always came off as the most urbane and aristocratic of musicians, but he was born to a humble Jewish family in Budapest in 1912...

...He ruled podiums in both the United States and Europe, particularly Chicago and London, his musical homes...

...Many of us do not regard him as the finest conductor who ever lived...

...a musical era—the tradition of the dominating Central European conductor—went with him...

...He later found out why: Before going on stage, the singer had been handed a special edition of the evening paper...

...I know why this has happened," said Krips...

...how he encountered the 86-year-old Winston Churchill at the Savoy Grill and could not keep from staring at him, remembering his debts to the old man for the inspiration of his wartime speeches, broadcast over the BBC...

...Solti confides that, in over six decades of near-constant praise, it was the nicest compliment he ever received...

...I have never forgiven myself . . ." Unable to obtain a visa to the United States, Solti spent World War II in Switzerland...

...He exhibits consistently what is most admirable in European liberalism, and, in self-examination, he is positively ruthless...

...In that day, all who wished to become symphonic conductors began in the opera house, where they acquired, through often tedious labor, the various skills of musical leadership...

...The war stunted his musical growth, but at least it did not kill him—more than can be said for many of those whom he left behind in Hungary...

...The Sterns attempted to observe the old traditions, but his mother was not especially religious, and when, at Passover, the family would say, "Next year in Jerusalem," she would pipe up, "But not with me...

...I probably would have done the same had I known . . ." Solti's parents had planned a post-performance party for him, but it was canceled, and Solti—then 25 and chafing—"felt that all my hopes had been dashed...

...He was unable to conduct, but he coached singers, studied scores, and practiced the piano (winning, in fact, the Geneva International Piano Competition in 1942...

...The Chicago Sun-Times called him a "master builder...

...He remained in Budapest until August 1939, when he thought to make a brief trip to Switzerland to seek out Toscanini at the Lucerne Festival...

...He explains that the "prime of my life" had been "wasted" and that "the desire to conduct was an irresistible force in me...

...would have enough, always worried that it would end too soon...

...After the war, Solti went to an odd place: Germany...

...My baritone, who was Jewish, had lost his self-control, and who could blame him...

...Solti figured "from the start," however, "that, as a Jew, I would never be allowed to conduct a performance...

...He had been set to conduct a Verdi Requiem in London to honor the deceased princess...

...Later, he checked with the baritone Geraint Evans, who contradicted, "Oh, but you spoke all the time...

...But Moricz Stern must have had higher aspirations for his children, because he gave them a different surname—"Solti," after a small Hungarian town—in order, as the conductor writes, "to facilitate our careers...

...Normally, musical autobiographies fall with a thud...

...how he, again, has "never forgiven himself" for not being kinder to his sister after the war, because, "at the time, I wanted to get away from my past and everything connected with it...

...In his concluding chapter, "Music, First and Last," Solti undertakes what amounts to a survey of the principal symphonic repertory, offering his hard-won conclusions on the Strauss tone poems, the Bach oratorios, and the symphonies of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, and Bruckner...

...Yet his astonishing strength is his understanding of people: their nobility and frailty, their heroism and vulnerability...

...When Solti took over the Royal Opera at Covent Garden in 1961, the house was in disarray...

...Solti remedied this with a European tour in 1971, after which Mayor Daley treated him and the orchestra to a ticker-tape parade down State Street...

...The orchestra had always been excellent, but had yet to secure an international reputation...

...Solti had led the remarkable Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 22 years, from 1969 to 1991...

...With Solti, more than a man passed from the scene...

...How else could a young, woefully inexperienced Hungarian expatriate assume the directorship of the Bavarian State Opera, "one of the most important conducting positions in the world...

...the Anschluss was on...

...Solti is, in both the particulars and the broad outlines of his book, a fair dealer, and he even finds occasion to mock his own memory: He thought that, in rehearsals for an opera that Sir John Gielgud was directing, he was "so much in awe" of Sir John's "beautiful English," "I hardly dared open my mouth...

...The young Solti was not an obvious candidate for greatness—he was little "Gyorgy Stern," son of a longsuffer-ing businessman whose every exertion was a failure...

...Later, Solti changed his first name to the German "Georg," so that his name is pronounced "GAY-org SHOLE-tee...

...Many European Jews were themselves infected with it," he says, "and I can still remember, with shame, how pleased I was . . . when people would tell me that I didn't look Jewish...

...On every page, as he winds his way through the chronology of his life, Solti studs his memoirs with facts, impressions, portraits, truths...

...Solti's Final Masterpiece The Conductor's Marvelous Posthumous Memoirs By Jay Nordlinger In the first week of September, as the world was mourning Princess Diana and Mother Teresa, Sir Georg Solti died at the age of 84...

...Solti's memoirs, by happy contrast, are superb, the written legacy of a conductor who stood at the pinnacle of his profession for virtually the entire second half of the 20th century, who met everyone, questioned everyone, performed with everyone, and gathered a treasury of opinions and stories that must be second to none...

...Solti never saw his father again...

...He expounds on the differences between European orchestras and American orchestras, and speaks frankly about his difficulties with the notoriously prickly Vienna Philharmonic ("For many years, I used to say that my favorite street in Vienna was the road to the airport...

...When the conductor Pierre Monteux finished a performance of the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, his wife greeted him backstage with, "Were you thinking of me, darling...

...He considers anti-Semitism—which "continues unabated"—"so ingrained that it can almost be described as innate...

...He went to Chicago in 1969, beginning a conductor-orchestra relationship that ranks with Eugene Ormandy-Philadelphia, Herbert von Karajan-Berlin, and Leonard Bernstein-New York in popular appeal and commercial viability...

...A month later, he was to conduct his thousandth concert with the Chicago Symphony...

...If only my parents had gone to Jerusalem in the 1920s or 1930s," Solti writes, "how different our lives might have been...

...I have had an enormously lucky life," Solti concedes, and that may be true, but he worked like a demon, and he exploited every break he got...

...Solti had built the Royal Opera into an international force and lent renewed respectability to the London Philharmonic...

...he never thought that he Jay Nordlinger is associate editor and music critic of The Weekly Standard...

...The Times of London said he was "the undisputed Grand Old Man of music...

...The newspapers did find some room for him: He had been the dean of the world's conductors, perhaps the best loved of them all...

...Later, in 1937, he had the fortune to work with Arturo Toscanini in Salzburg...

...Over and over, he startles the reader with the tales he tells or the admissions he makes: how, for years, he could not bring himself to conduct Shostakovich, "because I was convinced that anyone who could have written such relatively progressive music in the Soviet Union must have been politically compromised with the regime...

...Solti swallowed life voraciously...

...Inghe Borkh, the rugged-voiced soprano...

...He was working vigorously until the end...

...Paul Hindemith was renowned as a compositional revolutionary, but, by the time Solti met him, he looked and sounded "more like a Swiss banker...

...I'm coming back in ten days' time...

...His father accompanied him to the train station and, shortly before his son was to board, began to cry...

...He responded: "No—I was thinking of Eleanor Roosevelt...

...Solti, too, is free with his opinions, which may seem an unremarkable thing, but is invaluable in a musical memoirist and not a quality found in every one of them...

...This was embarrassing to Solti, who snapped, "Can't you see that I'm taking only this one little suitcase...

...he writes...

...As far as American officials were concerned, no politically acceptable Germans were available, so the post fell to Solti—who took due advantage of it and began, at that moment, his heady ascent to international fame...

...Solti writes movingly about his childhood and adolescence, recalling, if dimly, the chaos of World War I and, later, the murderous struggle in Hungary between the Reds and the Whites...

...Pure agony for him is the recognition that, for example, "I shall die without having learned much more" of Bach's music...

...Two years later, Time magazine put Solti on its cover as "The Fastest Baton in the West...

...The date, though, was inauspicious: March 11, 1938...

...He swears that, "in my mid-eighties, I feel more strongly than ever that I have an endless amount of studying and thinking to do in order to become the musician I would like to be...

...Since that time," he allows, "I have never been able to rid myself of the fear of anyone wearing a military or police uniform, or even a customs-office uniform...

...He writes, with the characteristic candor that makes a reader wince, "The sight of his tears and the harsh tone of my voice have haunted me ever since...

...Solti noticed, to his annoyance, that, in the third act, his Count Almaviva had begun to make "all sorts of mistakes," to sing "incoherently," to perform without confidence...

...And on the day he died, while vacationing with his family in the south of France, he applied the finishing touches to his memoirs, to be released on October 21, his 85th birthday...

...One of the first violins is a terrible Nazi, and he is trying to get rid of me...

...Even when his musical views are iconoclastic (Bartok's Mikrokosmos is "no less important" than Bach's Well-tempered Clavier), they are stimulating...

...His style—before an orchestra and in life—was always driven, nearly manic...

...But surely no conductor—and few people—ever wrote memoirs more compelling or durable than these...

...Hitler's troops had crossed into Austria and were heading to Vienna...

...After graduation from the prestigious Liszt Academy (where his teachers included Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly), Solti went to the Budapest Opera as a repetiteur—a staff member or coach—and learned the ins and outs of his complicated trade...