Background and career
Sir Georg Solti ( jorj SHOL-tee, Hungarian: [ˈʃolti]; born György Stern; 21 October 1912 – 5 September 1997) was a Hungarian and British orchestral and operatic conductor, 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. In the 1930s, he was a répétiteur at the Hungarian State Opera and worked at the Salzburg Festival for Arturo Toscanini. His career was interrupted by the rise of the Nazis' influence on Hungarian politics, and being Jewish, he fled the increasingly harsh Hungarian anti-Jewish laws in 1938. After conducting a season of Russian ballet in London at the Royal Opera House, he found refuge in Switzerland, where he remained during the Second World War. Prohibited from conducting there, he earned a living as a pianist. 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, where he remained in charge for nine years. He took West German citizenship in 1953. In 1961, he became musical director of the Covent Garden Opera Company, London. During his 10-year tenure, he introduced changes that raised standards to the highest international levels. Under his musical directorship, the status of the company was recognised with the grant of the title "the Royal Opera". He became an honorary citizen of the coastal holiday town of Castiglione della Pescaia, and a British citizen in 1972. In 1969, Solti became music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a post he held for 22 years. He conducted many recordings and high-profile international tours with the orchestra. Solti relinquished the position in 1991 and became the orchestra's music director laureate, a position he held until his death. During his time as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's eighth music director, 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. Known in his early years for the intensity of his music making, Solti was widely considered to have mellowed as a conductor in later years. 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 best-known of his recordings is probably Decca's complete set of Richard 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. Solti was repeatedly honoured by the recording industry with awards throughout his career. From 1963 to 1998, he won 31 Grammy Awards as a recording artist, making him the Grammy Awards' most-awarded artist until Beyoncé surpassed his record in 2023.
Solti was born György Stern on Maros utca, in the Hegyvidék district of the Buda side of Budapest. He was the younger of the two children of Teréz (née Rosenbaum) and Móricz "Mór" Stern, both of whom were Jewish. 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 territorial revisionist regime of Admiral Horthy enacted a series of Hungarianisation laws, including a requirement that state employees with foreign-sounding names must change them. Mór 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. His son's given name, György, was acceptably Hungarian and was not changed.
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. 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." Mór Stern was a religious man, but his son was less so. Late in life, Solti recalled, "I often upset him because I never stayed in the synagogue for longer than 10 minutes." Teréz Stern was from a musical family, and encouraged her daughter Lilly, by eight years the elder of the children, to sing, and György to accompany her on the piano. Solti remembered, "I made so many mistakes, but it was invaluable experience for an opera conductor. I learnt to swim with her." He was not a diligent student of the piano: "My mother kept telling me to practise, but what 10-year-old wants to play the piano when he could be out playing football?" Solti enrolled at the Ernő Fodor School of Music in Budapest at the age of 10, transferring to the more prestigious Franz Liszt Academy two years later. When he was 12, he heard a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony conducted by Erich Kleiber, which gave him the ambition to become a conductor. His parents could not afford to pay for years of musical education, and his rich uncles did not consider music a suitable profession; from the age of 13, Solti paid for his education by giving piano lessons. The faculty of the Franz Liszt Academy included some of the most eminent Hungarian musicians, including Béla Bartók, Leó Weiner, Ernő Dohnányi, and Zoltán Kodály. Solti studied under the first three, for piano, chamber music, and composition, respectively. Some sources state that he also studied with Kodály, but in his memoirs, Solti recalled that Kodály, whom he would have preferred, turned him down, leaving him to study composition first with Albert Siklós and then with Dohnányi. Not all the academy's tutors were equally distinguished; Solti remembered with little pleasure the conducting classes run by Ernő Unger, "who instructed his pupils to use rigid little wrist motions. I attended the class for only two years, but I needed five years of practical conducting experience before I managed to unlearn what he had taught me".
After graduating from the academy in 1930, Solti was appointed to the staff of the Hungarian State Opera. He found that working as a répétiteur, coaching singers in their roles and playing at rehearsals, was a more fruitful preparation than Unger's classes for his intended career as a conductor. In 1932, he went to Karlsruhe in Germany as assistant to Josef Krips, but within a year, Krips, anticipating the imminent rise to power of Hitler and the Nazis, insisted that Solti should go home to Budapest, where at that time Jews were not in danger. Other Jewish and anti-Nazi musicians also left Germany for Budapest. Among other musical exiles with whom Solti worked there were Otto Klemperer, Fritz Busch, and Kleiber. Before Austria fell under Nazi control, Solti was assistant to Arturo Toscanini at the 1937 Salzburg Festival:
Toscanini was the first great musical impression in my life. Before I heard him live in 1936, I had never heard a great opera conductor, not in Budapest, and it was like a lightning flash. I heard his Falstaff in 1936 and the impact was unbelievable. It was the first time I heard an ensemble singing absolutely precisely. It was fantastic. Then I never expected to meet Toscanini. It was a chance in a million. I had a letter of recommendation from the director of the Budapest Opera to the president of the Salzburg Festival. He received me and said: "Do you know Magic Flute, because we have an influenza epidemic and two of our repetiteurs are ill? Could you play this afternoon for the stage rehearsals?" After further work as a répétiteur at the opera in Budapest, and with his standing enhanced by his association with Toscanini, Solti was given his first chance to conduct, on 11 March 1938. The opera was Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. During that evening, news came of the German invasion of Austria. Many Hungarians feared that Hitler would next invade Hungary; he did not do so, but Horthy, to strengthen his partnership with the Nazis, instituted anti-semitic laws, mirroring the Nuremberg Laws, restricting Hungary's Jews from engaging in professions. Solti's family urged him to move away. He went first to London, where he made his Covent Garden debut, conducting the London Philharmonic for a Russian ballet season. The reviewer in The Times was not impressed with Solti's efforts, finding them "too violent, for he lashed at the orchestra and flogged the music so that he endangered the delicate, evocative atmosphere." At about this time Solti dropped the name "György" in favour of "Georg". After his appearances in London, Solti went to Switzerland to seek out Toscanini, who was conducting in Lucerne. Solti hoped that Toscanini would help find him a post in the U.S. He was unable to do so, but Solti found work and security in Switzerland as vocal coach to tenor Max Hirzel, who was learning the role of Tristan in Wagner's opera. Throughout the Second World War, Solti remained in Switzerland. He did not see his father again; Mór Stern died of diabetes in a Budapest hospital in 1943. Solti was reunited with his mother and sister after the war. In Switzerland, he could not obtain a work permit as a conductor, but earned his living as a piano teacher. After he won the 1942 Geneva International Piano Competition, he was permitted to give piano recitals, but was still not allowed to conduct. During his exile, he met Hedwig (Hedi) Oeschli, daughter of a lecturer at Zürich University; they married in 1946. In his memoirs, he wrote of her, "She was very elegant and sophisticated. ... Hedi gave me a little grace and taught me good manners – although she never completely succeeded in this. She also helped me enormously in my career".
With the end of the war, Solti's luck changed dramatically. He was appointed musical director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich in 1946. In normal circumstances, this prestigious post would have been an unthinkable appointment for a young and inexperienced conductor, but the leading German conductors such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Clemens Krauss, and Herbert von Karajan were prohibited from conducting pending the conclusion of denazification proceedings against them. Under Solti's direction, the company rebuilt its repertoire and began to recover its prewar eminence. He benefited from the encouragement of the elderly Richard Strauss, in whose presence he conducted Der Rosenkavalier. Strauss was reluctant to discuss his own music with Solti, but gave him advice about conducting.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
