Season with Solti [antikvár]

Ju 'ust before eight o'clock in the evening, the long black limousine swings off the boulevard, down a side street, and into an alley near Chicago's Loop. It glides to a stop at a shadowed back door to a seventy-year-old building. The man who emerges moves a trifle awkwardly. He has a neck problem, developed through years at his work, that prevents him from moving his head easily from side to side. His formal wear—white tie and tails—appears to fit poorly and his complexion is a little gray: he's been fighting a cold and he's been sleeping poorly. ("My little girl got us up at four o'clock the other morning and we did not sleep the day.") Georg Solti is not a young man; he was sixty-two in the autumn of 1975 and he is eternally apprehensive about his energy level meeting the demands of his work. "At eight o'clock," he told me later, "I was daid. I was not sure I could do it. I did not think I could go on." He steps into a tiny two-man elevator and is lowered, with a security guard, to the basement. The area, brightly lighted, has bland, cream-colored walls and one strikingly garish note: the huge pillar adjacent to his dressing room is painted a bright red—"to keep people from bumping into it." Some of his players are still in the green-carpeted locker room. Others are on the stage and a few are in the corridor, hoping to catch a glimpse of him, a glance of recognition from him. For the most part, all they are producing in these moments is the anarchic cacaphony of men preoccupied with interior things. —The principal cellist is checking the strings on his instrument ("I break the A and D strings about once every four days, even though they're made of steel wire coated with chromium," says Frank Miller). —The principal bassoonist has carefully selected which of his thirty reeds he'll need for this performance ("for a Beethoven symphony, I'll need a heavier-sounding reed than for a Haydn," says Willard Elliot). —The principal oboist and the principal flutist will sit down next to each other onstage but they will not speak. They have not spoken to each other for five vcars