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Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony

Sunday, July 20, 2025, at Ravinia Festival

One Score, One Chicago® brings the city together through the sounds of an iconic piece of classical music that reaches across generations. From live performances to family-fun activities and creative ways to experience the annual One Score® selection, Ravinia is turning classical music into a celebration for everyone.

The selection for the 2025 season is Ludwig van Beethoven’s phenomenal Seventh Symphony! Join us at Ravinia on July 20 for an afternoon of interactive experiences presented by Reach Teach Play, including photo-booths, strolling musicians in costume, instruments to play around the park, and Ravinia’s KidsLawn.

Get Concert Tickets 21+? Consider getting all-inclusive Beer, Brats & Beethoven tickets!

60-Second Beethoven Video Shorts

Explore this wonderful piece of music and the many ways it can be interpreted! The videos below feature the high-energy chamber ensemble PROJECT Trio along with El Sistema’s Teresa Carreño Symphony Orchestra and conductor Rodolfo Barráez.

A Look at the Symphony

PROJECT Trio talks about Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and brings its four movements to life.

Tap Into Curiosity & Creativity

PROJECT Trio dives into the genius of Beethoven’s music, exploring his Seventh Symphony’s rhythms, themes, fluidity, and universal appeal.

PROJECT Trio in Performance

PROJECT Trio performs an energetic and one-of-a-kind arrangement of the entire Seventh Symphony for bass, saxophone, and beat-box flute!

One Score® Across Reach Teach Play

From teacher workshops to high school orchestra clinics, and weekly music lessons to live performances in schools, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was woven into each of our education and community engagement programs.

Partners

Ravinia’s Reach Teach Play

El Sistema

Project Trio

Explore More Beethoven

Lockwood brings to bear a long career of studying the surviving sources that yield insight into Beethoven’s creative work, including concept sketches for symphonies that were never finished.

Check Out This Book

Equal parts absorbing cultural history and lively biography, Beethoven, A Life paints a complex portrait of the musical genius who redefined the musical style of his day and went on to become one of the great pillars of Western art music.

Check Out This Book

Fascinating anecdotes and witty illustrations about the most famous composers in history, introducing them to children as real characters who lived and breathed on a real historical timeline.

Check Out This Book

A Sample of the Symphony

Marin Alsop conducts the exuberant final minutes of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at Ravinia.

Recorded July 9, 2021

When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra returned to Ravinia for the first time in nearly 700 days after 2020’s closure, the joyousness of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony provided the perfect conclusion to the full orchestra’s return to the magic of live music under the stars, with guests reveling in the park and the performance in equal measure.

About One Score, One Chicago®

Borrowing a page from Chicago Public Library’s “One Book, One Chicago,” each year, Ravinia promotes the enjoyment of classical music and cultivates community discussion of a particular piece of classical music, focusing on a work that will be featured during the summer Ravinia Festival concert season ahead. Across the school year, excerpts and other elements from the One Score, One Chicago selection are threaded through many of Ravinia’s Reach Teach Play community engagement and in-school programs, such as themes adapted for interactive curriculum and a variety of guest performing artists in different classroom or group settings. Classroom teachers participate in multiple workshops that incorporate One Score connections, and Reach Teach Play’s own and partner student orchestras study and perform portions of the work.