Quotes by Georg Solti

• I was born and trained to communicate music, just as the sons were born and trained to hunt, and I was lucky to have grown up in Hungary, a country that lives and breathes music-that has a passionate belief in the power of music as a celebration of life.
• I wanted to get away from my past and everything connected with it.
• The stag tells him that he is the eldest of the sons - the father's favorite - and he warns the father that if he tries to shoot any of the stags, their antlers will tear him to pieces.
• The experience awakened 'my tremendous musical ambition, which has never subsided to this day.
• 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.
• I would never have become music director of the Chicago Symphony, which would have been an extremely sad loss.
• 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.
• I can only hope that neither of my daughters was scarred by their upbringing.
• During the first six years of my life, Hungary was one of the most important components of the Habsburg dynasty's vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, but after World War I it became an independent national entity.
• My entire learning process is slow, because I have no visual memory.
• 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.
• 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.