MEMOIRS.<i> By Sir Georg Solti</i> .<i> Alfred A. Knopf: 262 pp., $25.95</i>

Now and then in this carefully and diplomatically worded narrative, Sir Georg Solti pauses to wonder about his good luck, as if some beneficent guardian angel was watching over a productive life remarkably free of personal tragedy and professional setbacks. And so it always seemed for him, right up to the end.

Still vigorous and with his engagement book well filled into the millennium, Solti died unexpectedly in September, shortly before his 85th birthday, secure in the knowledge that many in the classical music world considered him the last grand old man of the podium.

Indeed, just as death arrived, the conductor was preparing to lead Verdi’s Requiem at a London Proms concert in memory of Princess Diana, a performance that doubtlessly would have brought him to the attention of a huge new audience. It might also have added fresh ammunition to his critics, who often found Solti’s music-making over-excited, superficial and lacking in any point of view.

Although highly selective in what he chooses to tell us about his life, associates and thoughts in “Solti on Solti,” he methodically recounts the basic facts of his busy career, a life in music apparently so devoid of controversy and major crises that it often seems downright dull.

Solti’s first break, he confides, was to be born in Hungary, where music is an essential part of daily life and where an excellent musical education has always been readily available for talented children. The future conductor not only had distinguished teachers and mentors--composers Bela Bartok, Zoltan Kodaly and Erno Dohnanyi--he also had numerous world-famous Hungarian podium stars to take as role models, conductors like Fritz Reiner, Eugene Ormandy, George Szell and Antal Dorati. What a pity Solti has so little to say about any of them. All we learn about Bartok, who gave the lad piano lessons, was how the great composer once expressed displeasure at the prospect of hearing one of his own pieces played by young Georg.

A Hungarian Jew aiming to become a conductor in Central Europe during the late ‘30s, Solti faced real obstacles and even physical danger from the growing tide of fascism and anti-Semitism. He was probably fortunate to survive the war years at all, passing most of them by lying low in Zurich, where he lived an unadventurous and inconspicuous existence as an opera coach. Unable to get a Swiss work permit to conduct, Solti focused on the piano; he even won first prize in a Geneva competition in 1942. As soon as the war ceased, though, he wasted little time in moving forward, applying the maxim he would later pass on to young conductors eager for experience: “There is only one way: Pester people until somebody gives you a chance.”

Solti must have been a successful pest because he was named music director of Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper in 1946, an astonishingly prestigious appointment for a virtual unknown. But here again luck was with him. Many of the country’s most distinguished and solidly established conductors of the prewar era--Wilhelm Furtwangler, Herbert von Karajan, Hans Knappertsbusch, Clemens Krauss, Karl Bohm--were still in the process of being de-Nazified, and Solti faced little competition for the job. After gaining valuable experience in Munich and, later, as head of the Frankfurt Opera, Solti became a name to conjure with on the Continent. By the late ‘50s, he was lucky once again when he caught the ear of a young British record producer named John Culshaw.

Itching to make the first complete recording of Wagner’s Ring cycle, Culshaw felt that he had found just the dynamic conductor he needed to preside over what, at the time, was considered a madly impractical scheme. The project surprised everyone, however, by turning into a commercial triumph, thanks to spectacular stereo engineering, a stellar Wagnerian cast, the glorious playing of the Vienna Philharmonic and Solti’s aggressive presentation of the score. The recording helped propel the conductor to world prominence, and he was soon being hailed on the cover of Time as possessing “the fastest baton in the West.” He spent the ‘60s in charge of London’s Royal Opera at Covent Garden and in 1969 was appointed music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

For most Americans, the subsequent 22-year tenure became the defining point in the conductor’s career, a productive marriage between virtuoso musicians and a powerhouse conductor who would tap into and unleash the orchestra’s latent instrumental muscle rather than concentrate on subtle interpretive niceties. The association continued and prospered even after Solti moved on during his last years to become an elder musical statesman, who conducted mostly where and when he pleased.

Solti tells the whole tale forthrightly, even modestly, but somehow one feels that there is more color and drama to this life than its author cares to reveal.

Even more damaging, the flat impersonal prose registers little of the conductor’s volatile personality. Famous names pop up regularly, but they remain shadowy figures and their brief comments are almost always trivial and uninformative. The conductor spent a morning with Richard Strauss just weeks before the composer died in 1949, but their conversation never got beyond musical gossip and shop talk.

In Frankfurt, Solti once lunched with Thomas Mann and later encountered Hermann Hesse in Switzerland, but by Solti’s account, neither writer had much of importance to say. “A new era has begun this evening,” Hesse solemnly remarks about the Soviet Union’s launch of its first orbiting satellite. “How right he was,” Solti concurs.

And that is about as exciting as it gets, even when the conductor calls on Igor Stravinsky in Hollywood and ends up discussing such mundane issues as how the composer managed to obtain Bordeaux wine during the war. Although he conducted Benjamin Britten’s operas during his decade at Covent Garden, Solti never found time to visit England’s leading composer and offers this excuse: “I wish that my schedule had allowed me to make the long trip to Aldeburgh [a two-hour drive] once in a while.”

Although noted musicians appear on every page, they too remain mostly two-dimensional and are characterized only by politically correct but empty compliments such as this “excellent” pianist or that “outstanding” soprano.

A trace of spiteful envy does threaten to surface when the names of Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein arise, but Solti quickly draws back without saying anything insightful about two conductors whose podium styles so differed from his own. A few ticklish professional situations are brought up, such as the aborted 1960 directorship of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Surely there is more to the story than what we learn here: an appointment over before it began, presumably because Dorothy Chandler enraged Solti by going behind his back and hiring young Zubin Mehta as principal guest conductor.

Solti is most disappointing when the subject turns to music itself. We learn, for instance, that Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony is one of the composer’s most popular scores because “the thematic material is beautiful, and the proportions, although large, are not gigantic.” The lengthy section devoted to Beethoven’s nine symphonies is even less enlightening, full of music-appreciation cliches and unoriginal observations that stress the obvious.

A more useful section of “Solti on Solti” shows him grappling craftily with the complex behind-the-scenes realities of modern symphony orchestras and opera houses, intuitively understanding how they are structured and the often bizarre world of musical politics that makes them function. Surely Solti was a genius in taking any backstage situation and turning it to his advantage. That ability, together with his driving energy and ambition, must account for the international stature Solti enjoyed, qualities that often disguised and compensated his plain musical perceptions and excitable but essentially passionless interpretations.

How posterity will finally rate Solti vis-a-vis his contemporaries remains to be seen, but perhaps these penny-plain memoirs drop a hint. Rather than one of those fascinating high priests of the podium who not so long ago mesmerized concert and opera audiences the world over, Solti emerges here as a less charismatic sort of father figure, a forerunner of today’s efficient but depressingly faceless modern maestros.