Zachary Solov, who died Saturday at age 81, enlivened performances at the Metropolitan Opera in the 1950s by adding new choreography to dozens of operas.

As the Met’s chief choreographer and ballet master, Solov oversaw a period of creativity in dance within opera that was unparalleled since George Balanchine had briefly attempted a similar project in the mid-1930s.

Solov founded a new dance troupe, added extensive choreography to dozens of operas in the Met’s repertory, and scored two original ballets for his troupe to perform.

As second-class citizens on the operatic artistic ladder, the dancers needed work choreographed especially for them to keep morale high, he wrote. “Just because one night the dancers may be fluttering about on point in ‘Dance of the Hours’ or making the stage sizzle in the Bacchanalian rites of ‘Samson and Delila’ does not mean that the next night they may not be carrying spears or carting prima donnas and rotund tenors off stage on their balletic backs after a death scene,” he wrote in 1956. “The dancers are there strictly to serve.”

Although Solov was only 28 when he took the job at the Met in 1951, he was already an experienced dancer and choreographer.

A native of Philadelphia, he grew up with deaf parents, a fact that his biographer, Dean Temple, feels had a formative effect on his ability to communicate with his body.

Solov began dancing as a street busker and soon was performing tap on radio on the “Horn and Hardardt Children’s Hour.” He studied ballet from age 11 with the Littlefield Ballet, attended Balanchine’s American Ballet School, and performed in the enormous “American Jubilee” company at the New York World’s Fair in 1940.

Solov toured North and South America with American Ballet and other prominent companies. During four years in the Army he served in an entertainment unit in China, Burma, and India, choreographing 30 shows for Melvyn Douglas’s troupe.

Signed by the Ballet Theater immediately after World War II, Solov toured for three years and then was the principal dancer in the 1949 Broadway production of “Along Fifth Avenue,” which starred Jackie Gleason.

Solov came to be noticed in New York in the summer of 1950 for choreographing interstitial ballets for “Music Fair,” a series of theater-in-the-round productions at Lambertville, N.J.

For the 1951-52 season, the Met signed Solov to rechoreograph Johann Strauss’s “Die Fledermaus.” The Times’s critic, Howard Taubman, said he “helped to brighten the production, for it is a vast improvement over what was done before.”

The Met agreed, and in March 1951 appointed him chief choreographer and ballet master. Solov set off at breakneck speed, auditioning 75 dancers a day for five days until he had cast an almost entirely new company. Among them was Janet Collins, the first black ballet dancer hired by the Met. (Rudolf Bing, asked in 1966 to name his greatest accomplishment as Met director, replied that it was breaking the color barrier. Marian Anderson first sang at the Met in 1955.)

Of Collins’s performance in “Aida,” in which she played an Ethiopian slave in the triumphal scene, Dance News observed that “the ballet rightly becomes the peak of the scene instead of, as usually happens, the somewhat embarrassing anticlimax.”

Solov provided new material for 10 operas in his first season, including Scottish dances for “Lucia Di Lamamoor,” gypsy dances for “La Traviata,” and a dramatic solo in “Manon” for Maria Karnilova, who experienced even greater fame dancing for Jerome Robbins.

Critics took note of the new emphasis on dance, part of a more general renovation of the Met undertaken by Bing beginning in 1950 that included bringing in directors like Garson Kanin and Alfred Lunt. Solov won the Capezio Dance Award in 1952, the first year it was offered, “for distinguished service in the field of American dance.”

The next season, 1952-53, Solov rechoreographed “La Giaconda” and the bachanale for “Samson et Dalila,” which the Times described as “highly sexed and uninhibited in character with a sense of obsession animating it.”

In 1954, Solov composed “Vittorio,” an independent work based on the little-known existence of Verdi’s ballet music, written for ballets within his operas that are normally not performed in America. Solov, as was his custom in his own works, danced the title role.

Solov continued full-time at the Met until 1958, when he left because Bing refused to make the ballet into a more or less freestanding company. He returned regularly over the years as a guest choreographer, and his work continued to be performed at the Met as late as the mid-1990s, when “Hansel and Gretel” was rechoreographed for the first time since the late 1960s. While viewing a new production of “Samson et Dalila” in the mid-1990s, he told a companion that did not so much mind having his own choreography replaced – it was all part of show business to him – as he did that the lead singer was bald.

After leaving the Met, Solov choreographed for the Canadian Opera Company and the San Francisco Opera and toured widely with his own troupe, the Zachary Solov Ballet Ensemble, performing his signature works “Orfeo” and “Allegresse.” He contributed works to the Joffrey Ballet and other major companies, directed summer stock, helped beginning dance companies nationwide, and for several years taught at Skidmore College.

Solov kept an apartment on West 58th Street and he summered at Saratoga Springs, sharing a home for many years with the Times’s charismatic dance critic, John Martin. It was Martin who had written, when Solov first took his job at the Met,” in the empire of larynx and catgut, the tutu is an unassimilated alien.” Through dint of effort, Solov assimilated it.

Zachary Solov

Born February 15, 1923, in Philadelphia; died November 6 in New York of heart failure. He had no immediate family.