One Score, One Chicago

Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony

July 20, 2025, at Ravinia Festival

One Score, One Chicago^® brings students, families, and communities together through the iconic sounds in classical music that reach 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.

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. A public digital resource guide will be available on this page in the spring.

The selection for the 2025 season is Ludwig van Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, which will be performed at Ravinia on July 20 by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Ravinia Chief Conductor Marin Alsop. Before the Sunday early-evening concert, Reach Teach Play presents family activities, pop-up performances, interactive musical experiences, and more for everyone at Ravinia in the afternoon.

Beethoven was the stuff of stories from a young age, thrust onto concert stages before the age of 10—like the Mozart siblings, Nannerl and Wolfgang—when his father recognized his remarkable skill playing the piano. He learned string instruments as well, but piano was his focus until just before his teens, when he began to compose music.

As many years passed before Beethoven assigned his first “opus number” to a composition, the mark of his belief in his work’s quality. It did not take as much time—only about eight years—for Beethoven to revolutionize the music composed, performed, and enjoyed during his lifetime, producing bigger sounds with more complex, thoughtful themes. His music around this time is often seen as a response to his advancing deafness, but it was also motivated by the Napoleonic Wars that surrounded him.

Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony dates from the time when Napoleon began losing his grip on Europe, which the composer welcomed. The Seventh Symphony has been an enduring favorite of listeners in great part because of the joyful spirit that’s felt in many different themes and passages, from a variety of dancing rhythms to moments of proud reverence and a whirlwind finale.

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