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The untold story of how the Chicago Symphony Orchestra forged its place among the world’s foremost performing arts institutions through 135 years of change.

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra boasts a tradition and staying power that few cultural institutions can rival—a legacy that is tested each time one music director passes the conductor’s baton to another. In this first narrative account of the orchestra’s 135-year history, music critic and historian Phillip Huscher delivers a passionate description of how an upstart ensemble rose to international prominence and established itself as the premier symphony orchestra in the United States. 

With a scholar’s care for detail and a novelist’s attention to drama, Huscher invites us into the tangled machinations behind the success or failure of each chapter in the orchestra’s storied past. We see how legendary directors such as Fritz Reiner, Sir Georg Solti, and Riccardo Muti carried the orchestra to new heights of technical perfection and sonic brilliance, but also how others provoked public outcry, caved to insider hostility, or fell to cruel press. The result is a vivid portrait of an orchestra fighting to sustain its identity amid the constant contest between past and present, supporters and critics, and artistic and financial vision.

Woven into this saga are personal stories drawn from newly uncovered documents and interviews with players, conductors, and policymakers about the burden of inheritance, the price of ambition, and the yearning to forge a legacy. Taken together, this is a tale about the power of music—how it can help us navigate our lives and leave a lasting impact on the world around us.

A Grammy and Tony Award–winning conductor, John DeMain has been a fixture of Madison, Wisconsin, for more than three decades, serving as music director of the Madison Symphony Orchestra and artistic director of the Madison Opera. Before and since then, he has been an internationally recognized conductor, equally at home in the worlds of classical music, opera, and Broadway.

In Working with My Heroes, written with the late Greg Hettmansberger, DeMain recounts incredible experiences—from his days studying piano in Youngstown, Ohio, to his years as an undergraduate and graduate student at Julliard, to his early jobs in summer stock productions, to numerous acclaimed productions—without ever losing sight of the wonder and awe he felt as a young musician first learning his way in the world. With warmth and humor, he provides valuable insight into the business of music making, while also sharing behind-the-scenes stories of entertaining situations he found himself in throughout the years—from playing piano at a gangster’s wedding to an unexpected dressing room encounter with a Broadway star to conducting an opera with circus elephants.

DeMain has had many career-defining moments behind the podium, conducting world premieres of Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place, John Adams’s Nixon in China, and Jeanine Tesoro’s Blue, as well as the U.S. premiere of Philip Glass’s Akhnaten, among others. He guest-conducted symphonies and operas in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. DeMain cemented his reputation with the 1976 Houston Grand Opera performances of George and Ira Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, establishing its stature as a quintessentially American opera. The singers, musicians, and composers DeMain has worked with over the past six decades are a veritable Who’s Who of American classical music. This memoir places readers by his side, allowing them to experience all the wonders and joy of a life spent making music.