I do not regret it for a second that my beginning was so hard. Now looking back, I'm very grateful for this hard beginning. It gave me the sense of fight, it gave me a sense that everything is not easy; I had to struggle very hard for everything I achieved, but without that probably I wouldn't have achieved anything.
In the first of two biographical programmes, Georg Solti recalls his humble Jewish origins and his early years, 1912-39, in Budapest. He talks about his family, his passion for music and football, and his teachers, who included Kodaly. He describes the enormous impact Toscanini made on him when they met at the Salzburg Festival in 1938, and his unforgettable debut as a conductor in Budapest on the night Hitler marched into Austria.