Summer music festival in Highland Park, Illinois.

Ravinia first opened on August 15, 1904, as an amusement park built solely for the purpose of increasing ridership on the Chicago & Milwaukee Electric Railroad. Ravinia Park included a pavilion, a baseball diamond and grandstand, an electric fountain, a theater, and a refectory building with dining rooms and dance floor. The open-air pavilion offered concerts by the New York Symphony Orchestra under Walter Damrosch, and dance performances by Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. Due to insufficient revenue, however, Ravinia Park slipped into receivership in 1910.

The next year, a group of North Shore residents purchased the park and founded The Ravinia Company in 1911. Ravinia became a summer venue for classical music, and opera was added to concert programs in 1912. These concerts and performances continued through 1931, when the Depression and decreasing revenues forced Ravinia to close its doors once again.

Four years later, in the spring of 1936, Highland Park and Chicago businessmen formed the not-for-profit Ravinia Festival Association, and on July 3, 1936, the Ravinia Festival opened its first season with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Ernst Ansermet), who have been in residency each summer ever since.

On May 14, 1949 the 1400-seat wooden Pavilion burned to the ground, but six weeks later the 14th Festival opened on schedule under a 33-ton canvas cover originally constructed for B-29 bombers. That summer Ravinia hosted the "Million Dollar Trio" of Jascha Heifetz, Artur Rubenstein and Gregor Piatigorsky. The three legendary musicians played under the canvas B-29 canopy. The replacement pavilion, which is still in use, was completed in 1950.

Seiji Ozawa was named Ravinia's first music director in 1964 and in 1968 the Festival appointed Edward Gordon as executive director. In 1971, James Levine became Ravinia's music director, a post he held until 1993.