When Poet Carl Sandburg called Chicago “Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,” he easily could have added “Music Maker” to that list. The City of the Big Shoulders forged many of the sounds that became popular American genres: blues, jazz, gospel and even country music began to take shape here. Today, Chicago’s nightclubs and concert halls are alive with all those sounds — plus rock, folk, R&B, hip-hop, electronic and ethnic music. And despite its reputation as a “stormy, husky, brawling” town (to borrow another phrase from Sandburg), Chicago is also a sort of paradise for classical-music aficionados.
FROM HOTEL TO HALL
The earliest evidence of music being performed in Chicago comes from the 1830s, when the place was just a frontier outpost. The owner of the Sauganash Hotel, Mark Beaubien, played a fiddle to entertain his guests. “He played it in such a way as to set every heel and toe in the room in active motion,” an early settler recalled. “He would lift the sluggard from his seat and set him whirling over the floor like mad!” Beaubien himself joked that his musicianship was not exactly divine. “I plays de fiddle like de debble, and I keeps hotel like hell,” the Frenchman reportedly remarked.
Chicagoans got a taste of more highbrow music in 1850, with the formation of the city’s first classical group, the Chicago Philharmonic Society, and the first local performance of an opera. Opera did not get off to a promising start, however — the theater burned down in the middle of the second performance.
It wasn’t until 1891 that Chicago got serious about becoming a world-class musical city. That was the year a local group hired America’s most famous conductor, Theodore Thomas, to start the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. At the time, Thomas was frustrated with his post at the New York Philharmonic because of its short schedule. Asked if he would come to Chicago, Thomas quipped, “I would go to hell if they gave me a permanent orchestra.”
Thomas insisted that his new orchestra should play only what he considered the best symphonic music, even if it was music that few people understood. “Mr. Thomas is here to establish a great art work,” explained his wife, Rose Fay Thomas, “and to make Chicago one of the musical centers of the world — not to provide a series of cheap musical entertainments for the riff-raff of the public.” The “riff-raff” may not have appreciated everything that the CSO played, but the orchestra persisted, and by the middle of the twentieth century, it had earned a reputation as one of the world’s best.
Several legendary maestros have led the orchestra, including Fritz Reiner, Georg Solti and Daniel Barenboim. When Barenboim stepped down as music director in 2006, critics commented on how he’d reshaped the CSO’s sound during his fifteen-year tenure. “Although it will forever be associated with Georg Solti, whose memory is still cherished by Chicagoans, the orchestra that Barenboim has molded is a different beast altogether,” Michael Henderson wrote in London’s Daily Telegraph. “Whereas the brass section remains stupendous, capable of blowing down the walls of Jericho, there is a breadth, balance and color (bloom, if you like) that one did not always associate with Solti.”
Few people questioned Barenboim’s brilliance, but he sometimes seemed arrogant. As he departed Chicago, he complained about Americans treating classical music as background noise. “I can’t stand being in Chicago anymore and hearing the Brahms Violin Concerto in the elevator,” he said, “because that shows me that when they come to the concert hall they listen to it in the same way.”
MUTI IN THE HOUSe
After a four-year search for a replacement, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra made a stunning announcement in 2008: Acclaimed Italian conductor Riccardo Muti would be taking over as the CSO’s music director in 2010. Muti had turned down at least one job offer from the New York Philharmonic, but Chicago won him over where New York had failed.
Tempests have followed the uncompromising Muti throughout his career. In 2005, he ended his nineteen-year run as the music director of Milan’s La Scala after feuding with other officials at the opera house. Accused by critics of behaving like a dictator and megalomaniac, Muti quit after a no-confidence vote from La Scala employees. At the time, Muti’s wife said she doubted he would ever make music in public again. Asked later about the dispute, Muti told the Chicago Tribune, “Sometimes when the music director is very strong in demanding quality, mediocre people do not want to accept quality.”
So far, the relationship between Muti and the CSO’s musicians looks like a love affair. The raven-haired Italian adored the music that the orchestra made under his baton when he was a guest conductor in 2007. He called the CSO “a perfect machine.” That experience persuaded Muti to sign a five-year contract as music director.
“This is one of the great musicians of our day, at the pinnacle of his artistic vision, coming together with one of the great orchestras of all time at the peak of their playing,” says Martha Gilmer, the CSO’s vice president of artistic planning and audience development. “It was incredible to experience. It truly was love at first sight.”
