With the death of Georg Solti at the age of 84 the musical world has lost one of its most dynamic conductors. He died on holiday in the south of France and was still pursuing an active schedule in concert, opera and recordings. He was due to conduct the Verdi Requiem at the end of the current Proms season in London, and was in negotiation over a new production of Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades to take place after the reopening of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
He was born Gyuri Stern in Budapest in 1912 (the change of name was intended to counter antiSemitism) and studied at the city's Liszt Academy of Music under Dohnanyi and Bartok (for piano) and Kodaly (composition). His early achievements might have suggested a career as pianist or accompanist and he joined the opera house in Budapest as repetiteur at the age of 18. He was noticed for making a favourable impression on Toscanini when he worked on the latter's productions at the Salzburg Festival in 1936 and 1937 and he made his debut as a conductor in Budapest in 1938 in Mozart's Nozze di Figaro.
He spent the war years in Switzerland where, in 1942, he took first prize at the Geneva International Piano Competition. His career blossomed in the immediate post-war years. In 1946, he was invited to conduct Beethoven's Fidelio in Munich and his success in it led to his appointment as musical director of the Bavarian State Opera. There he was to conduct Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier in the composer's presence, and he also conducted at the composer's funeral in 1949. He made his first recordings as a pianist, partnering the German violinist, Georg Kulenkampff in 1947, and was quickly to become one of the most active conductors recording for the Decca label. He made his Covent Garden debut in Der Rosenkavalier in 1959, and took over the musical directorship of the house just two years later. It was during his tenure there that the company established its international credentials.
In the late 1950s he began work on Decca's pioneering complete studio recording of Wagner's Ring, a spectacular achievement and probably the monument for which the conductor will be remembered by the largest public. In 1969 he became musical director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and chose to leave Covent Garden in 1971. He was knighted that year and, on taking British nationality in 1972, became Sir Georg. From the 1970s on he opted to concentrate more of his energies on concert repertoire. In later years, he also held posts with the Orchestre de Paris and the London Philharmonic. He recorded widely in Chicago and elsewhere, not only the well-known cycles of Mahler, Beethoven, Brahms, but also Schoenberg's Moses und Aron and Tippet's Fourth Symphony.
After the death of Herbert von Karajan in 1989, it was Solti who stood in for him to conduct Verdi's Un ballo in maschera at the Salzburg Festival, and he also succeeded Karajan as artistic director of the Salzburg Easter Festival. It was Solti, too, who in 1991 conducted four concert performances of Verdi's Otello with Luciano Pavarotti, the tenor's only outings in the role coinciding with the conductor's last appearances as music director of the Chicago Symphony.
The especial thrust, incisiveness and dramatic flair of Solti's conducting were as self-evident as they were divisive of opinion. He was of the breed of orchestral disciplinarian often characterised by the epithet "martinet". Although he was often criticised for engendering music-making that was too hard-driven (even being taken to task for offering "a climax in every bar" in Wagner), his most recent work was felt to show signs of a new mellowness. In the perpetuity guaranteed through recordings, that particular debate can continue in the wake of a new recording of Don Giovanni with Bryn Terfel, due out this month.
