World famous Hungarian-born music conductor

Sir Georg Solti, who died on 5 September, 1997, aged 84, was a revered conductor who to this day holds the record for having received the most Grammy Awards.

He won 31 in total, including the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, and was nominated an additional 74 times before his death.

Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for over three decades and a Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, his work remains an inspiration to young musicians all over the globe.

“My life is the clearest proof that if you have talent, determination and luck, you will make it in the end,” he once remarked. “Never give up.”

Georg Solti was born Gyorgy Stern on 21 October, 1912, in Budapest, Hungary. After learning to play the piano at any early age, he spent much of his youth playing in Hungarian opera houses and studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music.

1938 saw the young Jew make his debut conducting at the Budapest Opera with ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ but the outbreak of World War Two a year later drove him to neutral Switzerland where he coached singers and won first prize at the Geneva International Competition in 1942.

However, with Germany in Allied hands in 1945, he returned to his first love of conducting and promptly took over as music director of the Barvarian State Opera in Munich. There, despite being relatively inexperienced, he soon gained recognition and made valuable contacts which, in 1961, eventually saw him join the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden.

While he would spend nearly a decade in that post, he was also to be made music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1961. Altogether, he conducted an incredible 999 performances there over three decades, including the work of Brahms, Bruckner and Beethoven, and is today credited with enhancing the orchestra’s international reputation.

After further posts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra and the Paris Opera, the 1970s and 80s saw him appointed director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

He also formed the World Orchestra for Peace in celebration of the United Nations 50th anniversary and began making a succession of successful recordings with Decca Records, most notably the very first and as yet unsurpassed rendition of Wagner’s ‘Ring Cycle’. Even today, his CDs are praised for their expert production values.

In 1976 he was awarded a knighthood for his outstanding contribution to music and, just over a decade later in 1989, received Britain’s highest musical honour, the Gold Medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society.

He never truly retired and was planning concerts years ahead of his sudden death at the age of 84.

“I don’t want to retire because I would die, I most certainly would die,” the much-loved conductor told the Associated Press shortly before his death. “I love work and I love music. This is the point. I do it only because I love it. I really love it.”

A plaque now adorns the Budapest house where he grew up.

One of his most memorable performances came during a 1976 production of ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ with the Paris Opera, in which he accidentally stabbed the baton into his forehead amid the third act. Despite the blood streaming down his face, he simply slapped cold water onto the cut and continued conducting.

He collaborated with comic actor Dudley Moore to create the 1991 educational television series ‘Orchestra!’ and, just before he died, formed the Solti Foundation with the aim of fostering young talent throughout the world.