Editor’s note: This story is part of Meet a UChicagoan, a regular series focusing on the people who make UChicago a distinct intellectual community.
With baton in hand, Barbara Schubert steps up to her podium before the University Symphony Orchestra.
The musicians sit at the ready, eyes on their conductor. Tall and poised, Schubert casts her gaze over the players. Then, as she has for the past 50 years, she lifts her arm—and the music starts, rising and swelling to fill Mandel Hall on the University of Chicago campus.
For Schubert, nothing compares to the rush she feels leading the orchestra.
“People say that being a conductor is like having a fatal disease, in that you get bitten by it and then you can't escape because it’s so compelling,” she said. “The exhilaration that comes from experiencing and being an integral part of a live performance, I think is unmatched.”
This devotion to her craft has driven her through a half-century at the front of the ensemble. In that time, she has pushed generations of musicians—students from all fields of study, plus alumni who never quite wanted to leave—to perform works that would challenge even professional orchestras. In the process, Schubert built a community that, for many, has been a defining piece of their UChicago experience.
This May, nearly 100 alumni who've played for Schubert will return to Mandel Hall to take the stage with her again. The Opus 50 concerts, May 9 and 10, are the Department of Music's tribute to her work at the podium and beyond.
Over the course of the weekend, they’ll present music from Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler, sit in on open rehearsals and swap stories from five decades as they reconnect with classmates they haven't seen since college.
For some, the orchestra has become a family tradition. Alumnus violinist Alexandra Hobaugh, now a lawyer, met her husband Michael when they were both students in the orchestra. Years later, their two daughters followed them into the orchestra to play with Schubert as well.
"She's created a space for creativity in our lives and helped souls bloom—whether they knew it at the time or not," Hobaugh said.
Schubert as a maestra in the making
The first piece Schubert ever conducted with the orchestra was Strauss's Death and Transfiguration, a tone poem exploring the death of an artist.
It was 1976. A first-year graduate student at UChicago, she asked the conductor at the time—a medievalist scholar leading the orchestra more out of necessity—if she could guest-conduct. He said yes. One thing led to another, Schubert said, and she was appointed full-time.
“When I started out, I didn't have much experience at all,” she said. “I went to conducting camp at the Monteux School to learn the craft, but most importantly, to learn how to immerse myself in the experience of studying, learning and interpreting the score—and then how to translate that to the musicians.”
Monteux, an acclaimed center in Maine, marked the beginning of a serious training arc. By 1985, she was selected for the prestigious Tanglewood Seminar for Conductors, where she worked with Leonard Bernstein and other major figures. Through the decades after, she continued to hone her skills through workshops and collaborations, later serving as president of the International Conductor's Guild.
Outside of the University, she has led the DuPage Symphony for nearly 40 years and was named Illinois Conductor of the Year in 2003. At UChicago, she has dedicated herself to running the Performance Program, providing support to over a dozen ensembles, and is a senior lecturer in the Music Department.
But across her many collaborations with both academic units and performers, every moment that has come to define the orchestra has had Schubert at its center.
“I'm always really impressed by how Barbara is committed to cooperating and coordinating with other fields,” said David Shepherd, a UChicago alumnus and orchestra bassist since 1989. “Being on a university campus, I think it's so enriching that Barbara helps to integrate us with academic life.”
Though serious in the rehearsal room, she’s also brought a light-hearted approach to her work. She conducted the 1812 Overture by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the University's centennial celebration, with then-President Hanna Holborn Gray pulling the rope to "fire" a papier-mâché cannon on cue.
And in 1981, when Mandel Hall was being renovated and the orchestra was displaced into a gymnasium with bad acoustics, she invented what has since become an institution: the annual Halloween concert, complete with a themed program, a costumed conductor and an elaborate entrance down the center aisle.
Now, families across Hyde Park plan their autumns around it. The first Halloween performance is for children, who often arrive in costumes of their own.
Over the years, Schubert has ridden in on a shark for a Jaws-themed program, dressed as Brünnhilde for Richard Wagner, and conducted Gustav Holst's The Planets as Jane Jetson. She declines to disclose what she's planning for next year. The idea, she said, usually arrives in the summer.
"It will come to me in one big vision," she said.
Pushing musical boundaries
On a given evening, the orchestra’s musicians might rehearse with a bomba ensemble from Puerto Rico, learn a new piano concerto co-commissioned by the orchestra itself, or work through the score to a restored 1925 Sergei Eisenstein silent film for its American premiere.
“It challenges me intellectually and emotionally. I like to bring that tremendous diversity to our audiences, but also to our students,” said Schubert. “They like that big challenge that I put in front of them, and that's what keeps us going.”
Universities without a performance degree—UChicago among them—don't typically program like this. But Schubert has spent 50 years doing it anyway, finding music her players may never have seen before and didn’t know they could play. To get them there, she moves quickly in rehearsals to diagnose what musicians need to fix in the practice room.
"She's very good at adjusting to what the orchestra needs at that particular rehearsal," said violinist Anna-Sofia Hobaugh, daughter of Alexandra and Michael, who graduated from the College last year. "She makes sure that we're hitting the benchmarks we need to that day."
A living legacy
Though Schubert will continue at the helm after the Opus 50 culmination, the weekend’s headline performances carry a poetic echo of her earliest days at UChicago.
While she began her University conducting career with a piece about death, she's now celebrating 50 years at the podium with Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony.
Eighty minutes long, scored for 100-plus players, including a full chorus and brass section, it culminates in a final movement that moves from despair to transcendence.
“It's an incredibly compelling piece, almost overwhelming in terms of the range of emotions that it expresses and the types of colors that it has,” said Schubert, “so it seemed like a wonderful goal as a culminating event.”
It's a fitting choice for a conductor who has spent five decades insisting that music is not just something you study, but something you do. During the Opus 50 performances, Schubert said she’ll be “concentrating to the maximum on the piece of music at hand.”
“I think it's before and after that I'll be reflecting about the 50 years, but at the moment of conducting, the most important thing is to have my complete focus and the absolute attention to detail that I can muster through every microsecond of the performance,” she said. “After that, I'll probably cry—and celebrate with everybody as well.”
—Reporting contributed by MacKenzie Tucker
