By Thomas Willis

Only in America. A Chicago Symphony Orchestra marketing campaign last spring paired Sir Georg Solti with Walter Payton, football superstar of the Chicago Bears. Over the caption “They both know the score,” Payton appears holding a baton; Solti is wearing a football helmet.

Approaching his 75th birthday last October, Sir Georg donned a broad-brimmed red fedora and an equally broad smile for a photo session. Under the headline, “Lightning Conductor,” the picture shared two pages in Vanity Fair with Sylvester Stallone’s ex-wife, Brigitta Nielsen. The headline was a worthy successor to Time’s 1973 Solti cover line: “Fastest Baton in the West.”

The variety of unusual headgear continued with a chrome-plated construction worker’s hard hat, presented by a Chicago real estate developer at a birthday gala in Chicago. Delighting the photographers present, he immediately put it on.

Even in America, an ordinary conductor might shy away from such goings-on, figuring he needs all the dignity he can muster to retain the concert-going public. But Sir Georg in his diamond jubilee year is anything but ordinary, and he knows his public. They are not the ritually oriented symphony patrons of the past. Many of them buy recordings as often as they attend concerts, and have little use for social posturings. They accept his funny hats as they do his insistence on the knightly “Sir” —with an affection and gentle amusement which does not in the least detract from the respect in which they hold his music-making.

That Chicago birthday celebration must have set a record for extravagant tributes to an orchestra music director. There were billion-candlepower searchlights outside and showers of balloons inside Orchestra Hall. President Reagan and 63 other political, social, and musical luminaries sent congratulatory messages for the program. The mayor gave him a medal, referring to him as the city’s “cultural excellency.” John Corigliano, the Chicago Symphony’s current composer in residence, combined bell sounds and “Happy Birthday” in a festive occasional work. At noon the next day in a lakefront park, a children’s choir sang in Solti’s native Hungarian as local civic dignitaries unveiled a bronze bust of the conductor to honor his service to the city.

The hoopla was understandable. Solti has done more than any musician past or present to place Chicago on the musical map. In his 19th season as the Chicago Symphony’s music director, he has conducted more than 700 concerts, and made some 50 recordings. Syndicated on radio, many of the concerts were aired in hundreds of American cities; others were televised for programming in Europe and Japan. The Solti-Chicago Symphony combination has further served as the city’s unofficial cultural ambassador, with frequent tours to Europe, Hong Kong, and Japan; Australia is added to the list this season.

His recording company, London Decca, is joining the jubilee celebration to mark one of the longest-running exclusive artist contracts in history. The conductor first signed with them 40 years ago. In 1981, when Decca released a complete “Edition Solti,” it numbered 231 separate compositions on 203 discs. Today, he is a classical superstar whose name has sold more than one million Compact Discs. His albums have won 26 Grammys, more than any other recording artist in the history of the award, and 20 Grands Prix du Disque.

There will probably be more. The company has released his re-recording of the Beethoven Ninth with the Chicago Symphony, Wagner’s Lohengrin with the Vienna Philharmonic, and two Haydn symphonies with the London Philharmonic. A Solti-Chicago Bruckner Seventh and St. Matthew Passion are still to be released, and sessions are under way this season for re-recordings of the Beethoven Fourth, Sixth, and Seventh and Tchaikovsky Fifth symphonies. In the future are Simon Boccanegra with the La Scala Opera and Chorus and an uncut version of Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten with the Vienna Philharmonic.

Solti did not sit idly by during the Chicago celebration. In addition to being the birthday boy, he was the star of the show. He borrowed Kiri Te Kanawa and Plácido Domingo from the Metropolitan Opera’s opening Otello and conducted the orchestra and chorus in most of that opera’s first act. He added Strauss’s Don Juan, which first appeared on the symphony’s program during the tenure of its first music director, Theodore Thomas, and has remained everyone’s favorite. Most interesting of all, he appeared as piano soloist for the first time in the United States, joining Murray Perahia for a roundly successful performance of Mozart’s Concerto for Two Pianos.

His reappearance as a pianist actualized a longing at least 15 years old. When he was 60, Solti confessed a desire to perform Mozart and Beethoven in public as well as nursery rhymes in private for Gabrielle, his infant daughter. With Gabrielle and her younger sister, Claudia, now in their teens, Solti presumably has a little more time for practice. He has been working up to public performance gradually.

In 1984 and 1985 he recorded the Mozart Piano Quartets with members of the Melos String Quartet. On the orchestra’s West Coast tour last February, when the truck carrying the orchestra’s scores, instruments, and formal wear was stranded en route to San Francisco, he and an ensemble from the orchestra performed Mozart and Beethoven chamber music for the waiting audience. And last summer he played five recitals with Perahia in Europe. The inclusion of Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion on those programs reminded him of his own teenage days in Budapest; during his years as a piano student at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest, he had turned pages at a performance of the work by Bartók himself.

Possibly with tongue in cheek, Solti credits the recently televised Moscow recital of Vladimir Horowitz with giving him the courage to play again in public: “I was terribly moved. Even the wrong notes were wonderful. If he is allowed to do that, I thought, maybe I am allowed, too.”

Solti’s most vivid memories from that time in his life date from 1936 and 1937, when he was granted leave from his position as a Budapest Opera coach to assist Arturo Toscanini at the Salzburg Festival. He credits Toscanini with teaching him one of the most important lessons of his life: “Talent is only part of the profession, the rest is industriousness, endurance, hard work, and constant study.”

He is also aware of how much the recording process has influenced his conducting: “Recording taught me more than anything else, particularly recording on tape. A good live performance is better than a good record, when the public is, so to speak, breathing with you all together on the same spot. But what you can do in records is to concentrate completely—on perfection in balance, or on rhythm or dynamics or the quality of the playing. And if you don’t like a certain spot, you have a chance to remake it.”

As Solti is recapturing times past with the piano and Mozart, so with the Strauss and Verdi which completed the Chicago program. The Richard Strauss operas were major items on the schedule of the Bavarian State Opera when Solti was appointed music director there at the close of the war. Strauss was still alive at the time, and Solti vividly recalls a visit with the aging master. Perhaps more vividly, he recalls the enormous amount of time and energy it took to learn and prepare the Strauss operas for performance. “I was doing everything for the first time, you see. When I came to Munich, I had conducted a single performance of The Marriage of Figaro in Budapest, two performances of Massenet’s Werther in Switzerland, and a single performance of Fidelio in Stuttgart. That was all. Fortunately for me, it took the Bavarians three years to catch on to the fact, and by then it didn’t matter.”

Verdi’s Otello was a particular triumph for Solti during the remainder of his operatic career-at Frankfurt, where he went in 1952, during his Covent Garden decade from 1961 to 1971, and during his short tenure as music advisor and conductor of the Paris Opéra, when he conducted the brilliantly conceived and executed production seen here when the Opera paid a bicentennial visit.

But Sir Georg is not a man who looks back. He is in robust good health and will tell anyone who asks that he feels exactly as he felt 30 years ago: “I can do the same things that I could do then, not only musically but physically. I play tennis, ride my bicycle, and swim when I am on summer holiday, and seventy-five doesn’t sound fearful to me the way fifty did when I was in my forties.”

A glance at his pre-birthday schedule was sufficient to dispel any speculation that he might be slowing down. The first week in September took him to Budapest for concerts with the Hungarian State Symphony. A week later he was conducting London Philharmonic concerts in the Royal Festival Hall. Then the three Chicago weeks, when every minute from 8:30 a.m. until midnight was filled with a workaholic’s dream schedule of interviews, necessary social engagements, record-signing appearances, planning sessions with the symphony management, auditions, piano practice, recording sessions, and concerts. After the final concert he caught a 4:30 a.m. plane to New York City and the waiting Concorde. He and Lady Solti arrived home in London that evening in time to bid good night to his daughters.

Solti has changed, of course. The total mental and physical involvement he has always exhibited on the podium remains strongly in evidence, but both stance and energy are more focused today. And his Chicago years have stimulated interpretive modifications: “I challenge them and they challenge me. Together we can take musical risks I once believed impossible—in phrasing, dynamics, balances. And they respond, to the smallest detail. I believe that only through the micro comes the macro, you know, and I am terribly self-critical. Not negatively, but positively—how to make it better.

“It is essential that we leave a document for the next generation, and not only for the next generation but for generations to come. I am not a music-culture pessimist. I don’t believe what you read every day in the papers, that this is the end of the symphony orchestra, the end of classical music, even the end of music. I don’t believe that. Great music and great performance will always move you.”

Pressed for a backward glance, he has no regrets. “The music has changed, of course. A twenty-five-year-old looking at a masterwork has no questions. When you are older, and this is true of any intelligent conductor, you are full of questions—out of self-doubt. And not only you but your public and, most of all, the orchestra always are expecting something better.

“I have worked very hard for each step in my life. Many people have done it much quicker, but nothing came easily to me. I don’t mind, because that’s the way it has to be done. You have to fight, to get it the hard way, because doing it the hard way is the only way you can develop. I am very grateful for the hardness, I wouldn’t change it.”

As for himself today: “Look at it this way. I dote on my wife and children. I have no unfulfilled ambitions to bite me or make me restless. I relish my freedom to insist on the right working conditions and I am free of envy. Although I’m far from contented with my work, I am happy with my lot. My only desire is to go on doing what I’m doing now—but to do it better all the time.”