Word: budapester
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Just 25 years ago last week, Jozsef Cardinal Mindszenty was sentenced to life imprisonment for trumped-up crimes against Hungary's Communist regime. After six years in Hungarian prisons and a brief period under house arrest, he lived for 15 years in the U.S. legation in Budapest, where he had taken refuge during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. During all that time and while he was exiled in Vienna after 1971 Mindszenty clung prodly to his titles of Archibishop of Esztergom, an ancient see that includes Budapest, and Primate (first bishop) of the Hungarian hierarchy. Last week Pope Paul...
Dirty Jobs. As a prodigy of the piano, says Solti, "it was absolutely logical that I should become a pianist." Instead, at age 18 he went to work at the Budapest State Opera to become a conductor. Why? "I can only say that deep in your heart, if you are a sensitive person, you know what your strength is. And I knew mine was conducting...
Deep in his heart was where the conducting had to stay for some time. For much of the next decade, he worked in the opera house doing "all the dirty jobs," coaching singers, positioning scenery, accompanying the nonorchestral stage rehearsals. Solti got his first big break in Budapest on March 11, 1938, when he was allowed to conduct Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro. The first act went well, Solti recalls, but with the start of the second act, the singers started making mistakes while the audience grew raucously restless. To his relief Solti later learned that his conducting...
...piano, winning first prize in the Concours International at Geneva, and developing a reputation as both soloist and chamber-music player. In 1945, then 33, desperately in search of an opportunity to conduct, Solti got word that Pianist Edward Kilenyi, an American who had studied in Budapest back in the 1920s (and whom Solti had got to know then), was the music-control officer for the U.S. occupation forces in Bavaria. Solti shot off a letter to Kilenyi and ended up with the job of music director of the Munich State Opera. Though his experience was practically nonexistent for such...
...stable home and school life. Also, he and Valerie are expecting a second child this month. Like fatherhood, though, Solti's biggest successes have come late in life and, while mellower now, he is going as hard today as he did as a handyman at the Budapest opera 40 years ago. This week he brings the Chicago into New York for two sold-out concerts at Carnegie Hall, then on to Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California. In July he will be back in the pit at Covent Garden conducting Bizet's Carmen. He will stay...