Lady Solti obituary
She was not on the list.
Valerie Pitts and Georg Solti said it was fate that brought them together in 1964. She was a young arts journalist, working for the BBC’s Town and Around magazine programme; he was an internationally renowned orchestral conductor and 25 years her senior.
“The day before the fateful meeting an American film clip was suddenly unavailable, so I had nothing for my slot,” she recalled. “In desperation, I rang Sheila Porter [a press officer] at Covent Garden. Of all my contacts, Sheila was the most likely to come up with an idea. ‘There’s always Solti,’ she said. My first reaction was to ask if he spoke English. I knew nothing about him and wasn’t keen on opera.”
She arrived at the Savoy Hotel to discuss the Hungarian-born conductor’s performances of Wagner’s Ring Cycle at the Royal Opera House, but he was nowhere to be seen. She was told to head to his room. “I set off, past the Gondoliers and HMS Pinafore suites and into the red lacquer pagoda lift. Solti’s suite was down a thickly carpeted corridor. I knocked on the door. No reply. I knocked again. A voice shouted, ‘What do you want?’ and the door opened. I was greeted by this figure swathed in towels looking like a prize-fighter. ‘Good morning. I’m from the BBC. I’ve come to interview you.’
“He apologised for being late. Steam was coming from the bathroom . . . He gave me a charming smile, then pointed with a long finger. ‘Do you think you could help me find my socks?’ I looked around the room. No socks. I looked under the bed. At that moment, Bill Beresford, who worked with Sheila, arrived to find me crawling out from under the bed with the maestro’s socks.”
Once Solti had been reunited with his socks, they did the interview. Afterwards he invited her to join him in the Savoy Grill for a drink. “I told him I knew almost nothing about opera, but I’d once seen a frightful production of Elektra in Frankfurt,” she recalled. “His impish eyes twinkled. ‘Thank you my dear. I was the conductor’.”
Over the next few days Solti bombarded her with telephone calls and bouquets of red roses, declaring that they should spend the rest of their lives together and ignoring her protests that while he might be separated from his Swiss wife, Heidi, she was not single. “It seemed preposterous at the time,” she said. “But that’s what happened. I was happily married, one of the new generation of career girls. I loved my life, which was suddenly turned upside down. I was totally intoxicated. My parents were horrified and distressed. Friends thought I’d lost my reason.”
In March 1965, after announcing to her husband of less than five years that she was leaving, Pitts joined Gyuri, as he was known in the family, on his six-week conducting tour of Israel. At his request she carried in her bag a pack of non-kosher salami. Thus began one of the great love affairs of classical music, as well as her great love affair with classical music. The latter continued after Solti’s sudden death from a heart attack in the south of France in September 1997, the same week that Princess Diana died. He had been due to conduct a performance of Verdi’s Requiem in her honour at the BBC Proms, but it became a tribute to them both, conducted by Sir Colin Davis.
Before his death the couple had set up a foundation to help young musicians, into which she poured her considerable energies as a widow. “When Gyuri was a refugee and young musician in Zurich for seven years, he was very dependent on others,” she said. “This way we’ll be able to carry on his work and he will go on living.”
She took a personal interest in the careers of those whom the foundation supported, including the pianist Lang Lang. “I was amazed to see his career develop as it did — it was really meteoric,” she said, adding: “I love all my chicks, my babies, because you want them to succeed.”
Anne Valerie Pitts was born in Leeds in 1937, the daughter of William Pitts, secretary to the city’s lord mayor, and his wife Nancy (née Lee). She recalled holidays in Morecambe, Scarborough and Bridlington. “Aunts, uncles and cousins came too, so we made our own entertainment, played cricket and had tremendous fun,” she said. From the age of 12 she started visiting family friends in France and Germany, describing these experiences as “great preparation for the life that was to come after I married Gyuri”.
At Leeds Girls’ High School she was, by her own account, a mediocre musician. “I played the piano, I loved playing it and I thrashed my way through all sorts of things,” she told the Hampstead & Highgate Express. “The joy of music making was there, but I was just so terribly untalented it really wasn’t joyful for anybody else.”
She had more success in drama, playing Olivia in Twelfth Night in 1953 for the junior branch of Leeds College of Music, Speech Training and Drama. She went on to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, appeared in rep, and in 1958 was a stage manager for Terence Rattigan’s Variation on a Theme at the Globe Theatre starring Margaret Leighton and directed by John Gielgud.
Before long she had joined North East Roundabout, the Tyne
Tees Television regional news programme broadcast from Newcastle. There she
undertook all manner of interviews, “including a de-skunked skunk, a female car
mechanic, walking to the causeway to interview the visiting Archbishop of
Canterbury and meeting Paul Robeson in his big dark coat and hat off the train
and taking him to the best hotel, the Station Hotel in Newcastle, where he sang
Sweet Chariot unaccompanied”.
In July 1960 she married James Sargant, a stage manager at Sadler’s Wells Opera Company. At about the same time she moved to the BBC as an announcer, working with Judith Chalmers, Meryl O’Keeffe and Sheila Tracy. She described the first space flight by Yuri Gagarin in April 1961 and was on duty in July 1962 when the first television pictures from the US were received at Goonhilly Downs in Cornwall via the Telstar satellite. On one occasion she had to apologise to viewers after the BBC inadvertently screened the wrong episode of the thriller series The World of Tim Frazer.
She went on to present the regional news programme South Today (1964) from the BBC’s Southampton studios and had a small role in the comedy film Dentist on the Job (1961) starring Bob Monkhouse. As her musical knowledge increased, she made appearances on the BBC Two quiz show Face the Music.
Her first marriage was dissolved in 1966 and on November 11, 1967, she married Solti, who had fled his homeland in 1938 with the rise of the Nazis and had ever since led a nomadic life. Soon afterwards he took British nationality and in 1971 he was knighted, making her Lady Solti.
Despite being caught up in the Solti whirlwind she continued to work in broadcasting, presenting Play School between 1966 and 1970. This was not without its dangers and she recalled once making a Halloween programme with Rick Jones during which her knife slipped while she was cutting a pumpkin. “We had to stop recording due to my finger bleeding profusely,” she said.
When possible she accompanied Solti on his tours, often with their daughters, Gabrielle, who became a teacher, and Claudia, an actress and film director, who survive her. She recalled a life of near-constant jet lag, including countless visits to the US, where he spent 22 years as musical director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. “People would ask, ‘Where do you live? Where’s home?’ — and it was difficult to say. It would have been nice to have a little cottage with roses round the door but that didn’t come into it really.” Summers were spent at their Italian home near the Tuscan seaside village of Castiglione della Pescaia, where the annual Georg Solti Accademia, a masterclass in bel canto singing, still thrives.
In later years Lady Solti was a tireless supporter of arts organisations both in Britain and overseas. She worked closely with the conductor Valery Ger- giev, succeeding where others failed thanks to her many years’ experience of “maestro training” her husband. She also chaired the Mariinsky Theatre Trust in London, which supports Gergiev’s company in St Petersburg. She advised the Hungarian Cultural Centre in London, was president of Sadler’s Wells Theatre Trust and was patron of the UN’s World Orchestra for Peace, which Solti founded in Geneva in 1995 to mark the 50th anniversary of the UN and whose first concert he conducted.
Of equal importance was her kindness to countless young musicians arriving in London with few contacts. She welcomed them with her radiant smile and wicked sense of humour, encouraging them to practise in Georg’s basement studio at her Hampstead home. Many were recipients of her generous lunches.
Four years before her husband’s death, Valerie Solti described their time together as “the most extraordinary, exciting, privileged life anyone could have had . . . a life full of laughter”. She concluded: “Gyuri’s a wonderful teacher. He’s taught me everything, not just about music, about life.”
Lady Solti, television presenter and patron of the arts, was born on August 19, 1937. She died from pneumonia on March 31, 2021, aged 83.
