Georg Solti Quotations

From Toscanini I learnt the essential and desperate seriousness of making music.

Although both sides of my family were religious, I was never forced to practice the Jewish faith. I did not really rebel against it, but then, as today, I disliked organized religion. I have a strange inhibition about praying with others.

The experience awakened 'my tremendous musical ambition, which has never subsided to this day.

I would never have become music director of the Chicago Symphony, which would have been an extremely sad loss.

The academy gave me a grounding in discipline and hard work that has sustained me throughout my life, and the lessons I learned there I now try to impress on young people.

After about six months, I told my mother that I wanted the lessons to stop, and she was intelligent enough not to force me to continue. Besides, the lessons cost money, which was anything but abundant in our household.

Friends are very important to me, and I have always had many of them. There are probably many reasons why this is so, but two seem to me more valid than any of the others I am a naturally friendly person, and I hate to be alone.

Fight the tendency to become complacent and do one kind of music - that is the death of a musician.

Between the two men, somewhere, a truth is lying, and that is what I try to find.

But one day, when I was still young, I was parted from my family and left my native country. I hunted and searched for music, and destiny turned me into the object of my hunt. The circumstances of life became my 'antlers' and prevented me from returning home.