Sir Georg Solti, KBE, was a Hungarian-born British orchestral and operatic conductor. He is best known for his appearances with opera companies in Munich, Frankfurt and London, and as a long-serving music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He won a record 31 Grammy Awards as a recording artist.
About Georg Solti in brief
Sir Georg Solti, KBE, was a Hungarian-born British orchestral and operatic conductor. He is best known for his appearances with opera companies in Munich, Frankfurt and London, and as a long-serving music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Born in Budapest, he studied there with Béla Bartók, Leó Weiner and Ernő Dohnányi. His 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. He found refuge in Switzerland, where he remained during the Second World War. After the war, Solti was appointed musical Director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1946. In 1952 he moved to the Oper Frankfurt, and took West German citizenship in 1953. In 1961 he became musicalDirector of the Covent Garden Opera Company, London. He became a British subject in 1972. In 1969 Solti became music director. of theChicago Symphony Orchestra, a post he held for 22 years. He relinquished the position in 1991 and became the orchestra’s music director laureate, a position he held until his death. He 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. The most famous of his recordings is probably Decca’s complete set of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, made between 1958 and 1965. 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.
He was repeatedly honoured by the recording industry with awards throughout his career. He won a record 31 Grammy Awards as a recording artist. He also served as music director of the Orchestre de Paris from 1972 until 1975 and principal conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra from 1979 until 1983. His son’s given name, György, was acceptably Hungarian and was not changed. In the aftermath of the First World War it became the accepted practice in Hungary for citizens with Germanic surnames to adopt Hungarian ones. The right wing regime of Admiral Horthy enacted a series of Hungarianisation laws, including a requirement that state employees with foreign-sounding names must change them. His father, Mor Stern, a self-employed merchant, felt no need to change his surname, but thought it prudent to change that of his children. He renamed them after Solt, a small town in central Hungary. In 1914, when war broke out, my father invested most of his money in a war loan to help the country. By the time the bonds matured, they were worthless. Solti described his father as a kind, sweet man who trusted everyone, He shouldn’t have, but he did. Jews in Hungary were tremendously patriotic. He never stayed in a synagogue for longer than ten minutes. His daughter Lilly, by eight years the elder of the children, encouraged her daughter to sing, andörgy to accompany her on the piano.
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This page is based on the article Georg Solti published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
