The Spirit of Music honors Theodore Thomas (1835–1905), first conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO). Born in Germany, Thomas was a respected violinist and conductor who settled in Chicago in 1889 to help establish the city’s first permanent orchestra. After performing
in the Auditorium Theatre for many years, Thomas achieved his dream of building a permanent home for the CSO. The Burnham-designed Orchestra Hall was dedicated in December 1904, only a few weeks before Thomas died. Fourteen years later, the B.F. Ferguson Fund commissioned Czech immigrant Albin Polasek (1879–1965), a talented artist who headed the sculpture department at the School of the Art Institute, to create the monument. The fourteen-foot-tall bronze muse is depicted holding a lyre.
According to Polasek, the face behind the mask on the lyre is modeled after his own. American architect Howard Van Doren Shaw (1869–1926) collaborated with Polasek on the monument’s granite exedra and bench. Stretching across the low forty-foot-long wall behind the bronze figure,
the exedra portrays members of the orchestra playing their instruments in sculptural relief.