Only hours before death came to Georg Solti on Sept. 5, he had made the final corrections to the book of recollections that would be published at his 85th birthday, on Oct. 21. Did the realization that death was near spur him on? Given the life force that always throbbed so fiercely through his veins, submission to the Grim Reaper seems unlikely. In any case, it was Solti’s way, right to the end, to finish a job neatly and thoroughly. “No loose ends, my dears,” he might have said.
Ten years before his death, Solti told me he dearly longed to set down on paper his thoughts about his life and career. Too many other projects weighed on him then. His retirement in 1991 after 22 seasons as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra finally gave him the opportunity. The result is a volume of memoirs appropriately titled “Memoirs” (Alfred A. Knopf, 258 pages, $25.95). The book, written with evidently heavy assistance from author Harvey Sachs, is readable and absorbing as far as it goes. A pity it doesn’t go further.
Everyone who remembers Solti during his Chicago prime, who knows what wonders he could achieve with the orchestra he called his pride and joy, will wish to read the book to learn of the hopes, struggle and sacrifices that accompanied his hard-fought rise to late-career glory in Chicago.
Those in search of probing insights into the vast repertoire Solti conducted, or the dynamic forces of art and commerce that shaped the world in which he traveled, are apt to be disappointed. Solti was a man of action, not deep thought. He gives you his saga in prose heavily larded with anecdotes but fails to set his career and musical beliefs in the larger cultural context of prewar and postwar Europe and America. And his self-serving way of revising history to suit his purposes will, at the very least, raise the eyebrows of those who were there during the Solti years.
“Memoirs” swiftly chronicles Solti’s Horatio Algerlike rise from a lowly coach in the dusty backstage studios of the Budapest Opera to one of the century’s greatest and most eminent conductors. Early on, he sets forth his advice to young musicians wishing to gain conducting experience: “Pester people until somebody gives you a chance. If you do well, very likely you will make rapid progress.” Solti followed his own preachment to the letter. Such was the talented young Hungarian Jew’s ambition, from an early age, to leave an indelible mark on the orchestral life of his time that he pestered everybody in sight until he got the chances he needed to propel him up the career ladder.
Solti was the last great conductor to come of age musically before World War II, even if his career really began with Europe lying in ruins. His account of his early years yields some of the most personal, hence compelling, chapters in the book. Solti’s doting mother recognized young Gyorgy’s potential as a piano prodigy and enrolled him at the Franz Liszt Academy in his native Budapest, where his teachers included Bela Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly and Leo Weiner. His keyboard studies at the academy marked the end of his formal education. To plug the yawning gaps in his knowledge, he would spend the rest of his life devouring newspapers, books and magazines.
The war posed a tremendous obstacle despite Solti’s unshakable belief in himself and his ability. He would have taken a coach-repetiteur’s or assistant conductor’s position at a Hungarian or German opera theater were it not for Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies. Solti, who lost numerous relatives to the Holocaust, makes no bones about his political naivete during the 1930s, when nothing much mattered to him save music. He spent summers working as an assistant to Arturo Toscanini at the Salzburg Festival in Austria. On the same day–March 11, 1938–that Nazi troops marched into Austria, the 25-year-old Solti conducted opera for the first, and last, time in Budapest. War broke out the following year, when Solti was in Lucerne, Switzerland, pestering Toscanini to help him find work in America. He received a telegram from his mother warning him not to return to Hungary.
For Solti, jobless and nearly penniless in a strange country, the war years in Switzerland meant a hand-to-mouth, black-market existence. He was refused a work permit because of his status as a Jewish refugee. “It was no longer a question of how to succeed,” he recalls, “but how to survive.” Virtually the only bright spot during his Swiss exile was winning first prize of $400 in an international piano competition in Geneva in 1942. It gave him enough money to live on for five months, supplementing his meager income as a pianist and vocal coach.
After the Third Reich fell in 1945, Solti, because of his intense hatred of the Nazis, was seen by the U.S. occupation authorities as the ideal musician to help revive Germany’s cultural life. He and his newly acquired Swiss wife, Hedi (the marriage ended in 1966, one year before Solti married Valerie Pitts, a British journalist 25 years his junior), ended up in a roofless, bombed-out flat in Munich. Solti was to spend six years as principal conductor and later music director there. His central achievement was to lay the foundation of the Bavarian State Opera’s postwar repertoire and reputation. But his conducting experience was woefully limited. For Solti, the Munich years were a game of catching up, of learning his craft in front of orchestra players who knew the scores far better than he. It would be the last time in his career anyone could accuse him of fakery.
While in the Bavarian capital, he badgered executives of Decca London to let him conduct recordings. Thus began the series of symphonic and operatic discs which, more than anything else, made Solti’s reputation in the 1950s and ’60s. In 1952 he left for Frankfurt, where the newly appointed Generalmusikdirektor found himself in increased demand for symphonic as well as operatic work.
The urge to spread his musical wings led him to America. He had been scheduled to make his U.S. debut with the CSO at the Ravinia Festival in 1952, but his visa application was turned down. He had to wait two more years before leading the Chicago Symphony for the first time, at Ravinia, in performances Solti recalls as “an absolute joy.” The CSO was the finest orchestra he had conducted up to that time. Solti returned to Ravinia for three more seasons, in 1956, 1957 and 1958. Though Ravinia was where he began his love affair with the Chicago Symphony, he refused to conduct at the CSO’s summer home after becoming the orchestra’s music director in 1969.
Appearing as a guest conductor with Lyric Opera in 1956 and 1957, Solti might have taken a permanent post with the company were it not for the negative notice he received from the Tribune’s acerbic critic, Claudia Cassidy, after a performance of “Figaro” at Lyric in 1957. Such was his fear and hatred of her that he turned down an offer to become CSO music director in the early ’60s when Fritz Reiner’s heart attacks prompted the trustees to have a successor waiting in the wings. The job fell instead to Jean Martinon, an able conductor whom Solti patronizes as “a weak music director” but who deserves credit for maintaining the virtuoso ensemble he inherited from Reiner and laid as a glittering prize at Solti’s feet.
If Solti’s years in Munich were, as he writes, “a period of struggle” and his tenure in Frankfurt “a period of calm development,” his 10 years as music director of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, beginning in 1961, were “a period of mature productivity.” When he arrived in London he promised to make “the Garden” the best opera house in the world. He left with the conviction he had achieved that, although not all the British critics shared that conviction.
The chapter focusing on Solti’s years as musical paterfamilias of the CSO will disappoint readers in search of something beyond common knowledge. Solti recounts the early difficulties he had winning the musicians’ trust, and vice versa; the CSO’s triumphant tour to Carnegie Hall in 1970; the historic first European conquest by the Solti/Chicago powerhouse in 1971; the subsequent successes at home and abroad; his “deep attachment” to Chicago. What’s missing is perspective, depth, local color and the sly, bitchy wit Solti could unleash like a thunderbolt in private.
You won’t find any of that here. What you will find instead are dubious, self-aggrandizing assertions. “Reiner was not interested in his orchestra’s place in the world. I was,” he writes. In fact, Reiner was known to have cared passionately about how his orchestra was perceived beyond the city limits; his reluctance to take on the crushing burden of a European tour in 1960 when his health was failing is something Solti doesn’t bother to examine. The only source materials he apparently was willing to consult were his own spotty recollections.
A musically savvy editor with firsthand knowledge of the Solti era in Chicago might have caught some of the other factual errors and faulty judgments. Solti claims to have “modulated and lightened” the crunching power of the fabled Chicago brasses; he did no such thing. Having never set foot in the Civic Opera House orchestra pit after 1957, he asserts that the recent backstage renovation of that venerable theater greatly improved its acoustics. In fact, next to nothing was done to alter the sound, because few besides Solti found it objectionable.
What is one to make of such assertions as, “During my time in Chicago I felt a clear commitment to conduct works by American composers”? While he eventually amassed an American repertoire larger than that of his successor, Daniel Barenboim (whose tiny repertoire of American pieces is easily trumped), Solti’s “commitment” was neither clear nor consistent. Indeed, he went through his final season as artistic chief of the leading American orchestra without conducting a single note of American music.
Those who found Solti’s attitude toward Chicago for the most part arrogant and condescending will find much in these pages to support their belief–starting with the maestro’s incredible suggestion that the city was on the skids before he settled here: “When I arrived in the autumn of 1969, Chicago was like a sleeping beauty. Within a few months of my arrival, (the city) began to awaken from her sleep.” While Solti got, and deserved, credit for restoring Chicago’s pride and enlarging her world image and self-image, he didn’t do so all by himself. The key strategists who made certain that attention would be paid–trustees chairman Louis Sudler and general manager John S. Edwards–are given fatherly pats on the back and summarily sent on their way. Solti acknowledges the orchestra’s own role in this without analyzing it.
Solti’s musical analyses, piled near the end of the book, are filled with commonplaces. Typical is his statement that “not one of the Beethoven symphonies bears any similarity to any of the others, though they are clearly the fruit of a single mind.” This is strictly Music Appreciation 101 stuff.
Much more valuable are those moments when the conductor takes candid stock of his abilities, proving his dedication to music is deep and real. Not gifted with a visual memory for music like his arch-rival Herbert von Karajan and some other conductors, Solti admits he always had to learn a score note by note. Perhaps his most amazing confession is that not until after age 70 did he feel he was able to master the details of a score to his satisfaction. But there was no question that, right to the end–his final appearances with the CSO were last spring–Solti always got up in front of an orchestra with a clear sound-image in his mind of what he wanted to achieve. How many of today’s podium pipsqueaks could claim the same?
For Georg Solti, the quest for performance perfection was eternal; his twisting road to eminence stood as testimony to that heroic quest. “In my mid-eighties,” he writes in the final chapter, “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.” If Solti went to his grave believing he had fallen short of his platonic ideal, his legacy proved him mistaken.
