Perhaps more surprising was the appearance, a little late, of Georg Solti, at Glyndebourne in 1954. Again the opposition was quite formidable, with Gluck's Alceste given a rare and wondrous set of performances by Gui, and Paul Sacher rising to great heights in Stravinsky's Rake's Progress. Solti was in charge in nine performances of Giovanni, and at the time nobody seemed to feel that a great new maestro had arrived. There was no great frisson so far as audiences went, either, judging by their applause at his appearance; yet history has since shown that such first impressions, or lack of impression, can be very misleading. The bubble of fame sometimes takes its own time to inflate. << less