Rafael Kubelík had two bouts of fame in Chicago. The first was as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s fifth music director, leading the orchestra from 1950-1953. The scrappy young conductor arrived in town charged with reimagining an institution in need of a new identity.

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The second bout happened more recently and lasted about 15 minutes. For a moment, his Czech surname was printed on bright pink filming notices that peppered Chicago neighborhoods. It didn’t take long for keen observers to figure out “Kubelik” was a code name for the hugely popular FX kitchen drama, The Bear.

Recently, The Bear seems to have dropped Kubelik and is instead now moonlighting as “Windy City Law,” according to filming permits and social media spectators. But at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Kubelík lives on.

CSO archivist Frank Villella said it’s been a “wonderful surprise” to hear the word Kubelík buzzing around town again this year — and he’s happy for any association with the symphony. There’s been more attention paid to the lineage of CSO conductors this year anyway, with the long-awaited appointment of a successor to maestro Riccardo Muti. In April, the CSO appointed Finnish cellist Klaus Mäkelä, who will be 31 when he takes the podium in 2027, making him the symphony’s youngest-ever music director — a fact that sent classical music fans digging through ages of past maestros, including Kubelik, who was 36 when he became music director.

“If there’s a resurgence of interest in our fifth music director … bring it. By all means,” Villella said. “If it encourages somebody to say, ‘Oh, who was that?’ They look it up, see it’s a CSO thing and say, ‘Let’s go to a concert.’ I don’t know that that will actually happen, but any PR is good PR.”

Code names are common on film and TV projects — especially ones as successful as The Bear, which has struggled to keep a low profile since they began shooting seasons three and four across Chicago in February. The show’s stars Jeremy Allen White and Ayo Edebiri have been spotted everywhere from Kasama to the lakefront.

But it’s unclear why the team landed on using “Kubelik” as its first attempt to throw fans off their trail. FX did not respond to email requests seeking comment on the choice. The Czech word translates to “bucket,” which provides little insight. Kubelik is also the last name of Shirley MacLaine’s character in the 1960 Billy Wilder film The Apartment, in which she plays an elevator operator at an office building where multiple men are vying for her interest.

Villella said the team at the CSO had even seen some social media posts suggesting Kubelík and White looked alike — although you would certainly have to squint to mistake the 20th-century maestro for the star of this spring’s Calvin Klein underwear campaign.

Or maybe the connection stems from the fact that in the 1950s, Kubelík’s efforts to reinvent the Chicago Symphony Orchestra parallel Carmy’s efforts in The Bear to reinvent his family’s fictitious fast-casual restaurant into a fine-dining establishment.

Regardless of why FX reached for the Kubelik name, Villella says the maestro deserves another look. On a recent morning he’s sorting through the CSO’s archives, which are packed with sheet music, programs from historical shows, photos and recordings on an upper floor of Symphony Center. Villella fawned over Kubelík records with technicolor covers he pulled from the shelves.

“I think these recordings still hold up even though the recording technology has changed so much since the early 1950s,” Villella said. “He’s worth a second look. He’s worth a third look.”

Born in 1914 in what’s now known as the Czech Republic, Rafael Kubelík came from musical stock — his father, Jan Kubelík, was an esteemed Czech violinist who performed in Chicago the year before Rafael was born. The younger Kubelík made his U.S. conducting debut at the CSO in 1949, a year before he became music director. The initial reception to him was warm, then quickly waned.

Kubelík’s tenure was a period in the institution’s history when there were big shoes to fill after longtime music director Frederick Stock died in office in 1942 — and finding a suitable conductor to step into the role was proving challenging.

In quick succession, the CSO had three music directors in seven years, of which Kubelík was the third. A strong proponent for music from his homeland, Kubelík programmed a lot of new pieces. He also led the symphony in its first-ever televised performance. And, his symphony-led recordings for Mercury Records are still in print today. But eventually, audiences in Chicago started to ask: “Who is this whippersnapper trying to teach us something new?” Villella said.

Kubelík made a swift departure and eventually, CSO hired Fritz Reiner, who reigned as maestro for a decade and helped to define the orchestra’s now-famed Chicago Sound. For his part, Kubelík went on to lead the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich for nearly 20 years.

And over the years, Kubelík remained a friend to the CSO, returning several times as a guest conductor before his death in 1996. A New York Times obituary for Kubelík called his tenure in Chicago “brief” and “unhappy.” But decades later, his time as a part of our city’s cultural zeitgeist has been extended a bit, courtesy of another contemporary obsession: trying to spy the set of a popular streaming show about the restaurant biz.

Courtney Kueppers is an arts and culture reporter at WBEZ.