The cover of "Passing the Baton" and its author, Phillip Huscher
University of Chicago Press
At the end of September, the University of Chicago Press releases Passing the Baton: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Music Directors Who Shaped Its Greatness by Phillip Huscher. The CSO’s program annotator since 1987 and longtime scholar-in-residence, Huscher regularly incorporates the orchestra’s history into his program notes and is no stranger to delving into its archives. To write this history, Huscher explored some unexpected sources, resulting in a tale as tantalizing as it is informative.
The following Q&A reveals Huscher’s process as he wrote a book that Yo-Yo Ma calls “a must-read for anyone interested in the story of this beloved cultural institution.”
Passing the Baton is the first comprehensive history of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in over 100 years. How did it come about?
Years ago, when I was working on a short history of the orchestra to give to concertgoers, I realized how much more there was to the standard story — and how much of what we knew was more complex and more interesting than we thought. The full story continued to tantalize me, and I wanted to tell it. But it was a big leap from writing the 10-page version to this book, which clocks in at more than 400 pages. And it took 12 years.
How do you start such a big project from scratch?
I had to find my own way in. I’m not a fan of traditional histories as a formula to follow: a strict accounting, week by week, detail by detail. And I’m allergic to non-fiction that is overstuffed with interesting but useless information, like a giant file cabinet that contains everything, whether you want to hear about it or not. I wanted to shake things up a bit and, above all, I wanted to tell a good story. We know that stories stick with people in a way that information doesn’t. And the story of the Chicago Symphony is an irresistibly good one. It’s one people should know: how one of the world’s greatest cultural treasures rose to the top, despite the obstacles —and stayed there. The complication is that a story needs a throughline — a clothesline, if you will, on which everything hangs. And an orchestra is an elusive subject because it is not a single character but an amorphous, ever-changing group of people.
So how did you find a point of view that worked for you?
One day I asked myself what if I told the history of this orchestra through the lens of the people chosen to lead it, to put their artistic stamp on it, to carry it forward? That became the spine of the entire story: What happens when the care of an orchestra is handed from one music director to another? Those handoffs are the most critical moments in an orchestra’s life. How a single leader can influence and shape the orchestra is the stuff of drama. That required a lot of digging beyond the obvious sources, and it raised all sorts of questions about the balances and limits of power within a major cultural institution. And because of this angle, this quickly became a piece of investigative reporting. I always kept in mind the words of the great novelist Hilary Mantel: “There isn’t any necessary conflict between good history and good drama.”
What were your sources, particularly ones that no one had access to before you?
Everything imaginable, much of it housed in the Chicago Symphony’s own Rosenthal Archives: oral histories, personal letters, office memos, telegrams, diaries, minutes of board meetings, annotated scores, scrapbooks as well as many of the interviews I had done over the years. Ironically, for a story that is often dominated by men, particularly in its early years, it was the voices of women that helped give it depth and humanity. The diaries of Frances Glessner, who became a close friend of the first two music directors, Theodore Thomas and Frederick Stock, brought that distant era to life for me. Carlotta Reiner’s diaries and correspondence exposed a lot about her husband’s elusive personality but also about their complicated relationship with Claudia Cassidy, the legendary Tribune critic. And it was Valerie Solti’s writings and journals, which had never before been examined, that cast an entirely new light on the famously triumphant Solti chapter.
There aren’t many resources for investigating the orchestra’s first decades. Was it difficult to bring those years to life?
It helped that I could step back in time by visiting some of the most important sites in the orchestra’s early years. I did research in the meticulously restored Glessner House, where the first two music directors, Theodore Thomas and Frederick Stock, were regular visitors, where members sometimes gave concerts, and where in 1917 the entire orchestra once sat down to dinner. I sometimes worked in a coffee shop in the Monadnock Building, an important architectural landmark that opened the same year the orchestra gave its first concerts. One day, like the CSO’s fourth music director Artur Rodzinskí eight decades before me, I climbed one hundred steps to the very top of the Auditorium Theatre, where the orchestra played its first concerts, to check out the acoustics.
What was the most satisfying discovery you made in the research process?
When I finished the book, I was terribly disappointed and frustrated that, despite all my digging, I had been unable to figure out where the orchestra made its historic first recordings in 1916. But then, after I had submitted the manuscript to the publisher, a tip came to me via Frank Villella, the director of the Rosenthal Archives, and that allowed me to piece together the whole story. Now at last we know that the sessions were not held in Chicago, as we had long suspected, but in New York City, in the middle of an East Coast tour at the end of that season. Fortunately, there was still time to get that in the book.
Were there any topics you felt were off limits, anything you worried was too sensitive to include?
The tradition of published histories of orchestras is largely one of hagiography, but I wanted to tell the whole story unfiltered, which is by far the more compelling tale. My longtime position working for the orchestra gave me more insight and access than an “outside” journalist would ever have. And I quickly realized that there was no conflict in balancing my great love for this orchestra with objectivity, fairness, and accuracy, because it is the complications of the story, in which commerce, politics, money, ambition, and power are pitted against the remarkable staying power of this great orchestra, that make you care and give the tale its force. So ironically, it is the orchestra that ends up providing the clothesline on which everything hangs, because when the battles have been fought and the dust settles, this great orchestra is still playing.
When you started writing in 2012, you had no idea how the book would end. Did that bother you?
It was a real cliff-hanger, because the book and the entire arc of the story might have had a very different tenor. What Klaus Mäkelä’s appointment brings is not just a change in the air but a sense of new possibilities for the future — the thrill of something different, the excitement of discovery, the joy of watching an important young career take flight. People like endings that wrap everything up in a big Hollywood finale, but I often find that contrived, particularly so in this case. Passing the Baton opens in media res — it is the morning in April 2024 when Klaus Mäkelä’s appointment is announced — and ends “unfinished” — to be continued. The history of the Chicago Symphony is, like the orchestra itself, an organic thing: it arrives not out of nowhere but from bringing many strands together, and it outlives all of the people who make up the tale. When my book ends, the story of the orchestra is not done, and people will want to know how it continues long after I am here to talk about it.
Postconcert Book Signing
Celebrate the release of Phillip Huscher’s new book, Passing the Baton: The Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Music Directors Who Shaped Its Greatness, and meet the author at postconcert signings in Grainger Ballroom, October 1-3. Copies will be available for purchase at the Symphony Store and in the Box Level lobby before each signing. The events are free and open to all ticketholders.
