Before Beyoncé broke the record in 2023, the most Grammy wins by a single artist, 31, belonged to a classical conductor: Sir Georg Solti. This episode follows his improbable path from Budapest, where his family changed its surname from Stern to Solti to survive rising nationalist laws, and where a 13-year-old Solti taught piano to fund his own schooling after his father’s war bonds became worthless. A performance of Beethoven’s Fifth under Erich Kleiber at age 12 locked in his ambition to conduct.

On March 11, 1938, the night of his conducting debut with The Marriage of Figaro at the Budapest Opera, news arrived that Hitler had invaded Austria. Solti fled to Switzerland, where as a refugee he was legally barred from conducting and spent the war teaching piano, cut off from his family as his father died in Budapest. We trace how those waiting years became a pressure cooker, how post-war denazification trials opened the door to the Bavarian State Opera in Munich, how Decca’s complete studio Ring Cycle turned him into a global phenomenon, and how he endured booing and a vandalized car at Covent Garden before finding his ultimate home with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

• How exile in Switzerland forged the relentless perfectionism behind the nickname the Screaming Skull
• The Decca Ring Cycle and the theater of the mind approach to early stereo recording
• Why Solti walked away from the Los Angeles Philharmonic before he even started
• The stagione system he forced on Covent Garden and how it elevated the company to the Royal Opera
• Chicago’s 1971 European tour, the ticker tape parade, and 999 concerts over 22 years