The four surviving Grateful Dead members — Phil Lesh on bass, Bob Weir on rhythm guitar and Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart on drums and percussion —put aside past differences to mark the band’s 50th anniversary. Soldier Field was also where the last original Grateful Dead concert took place on July 9, 1995, before the death of Jerry Garcia, the heart of the band. (The new Grateful Dead also played two warmup concerts on June 27 and 28 in Santa Clara, Calif., answering a demand for shows in the band’s home state.) After Garcia’s death, his bandmates dropped the Grateful Dead name; they sometimes worked together with other musicians as the Other Ones or the Dead, and they led their own bands. But reviving the Grateful Dead name and establishing these concerts as the band’s last ones set a higher standard. The band is well aware that its constituency of Deadheads — who came to the shows in full regalia of tie-dye, vintage concert T-shirts and every conceivable variation of the Dead’s logos — is admiring but also intently critical.

Garcia’s replacement in the reconstituted lineup was Trey Anastasio of Phish, who carried off his fraught assignment with grace and head-bobbing enthusiasm. The keyboardists were Jeff Chimenti on organ and synthesizers, who has played in bands led by Mr. Weir and Mr. Lesh, and Bruce Hornsby on piano, who toured with the Grateful Dead in the early 1990s and whose palette encompasses florid honky-tonk, harmonically advanced jazz and pinpoint quasi-Baroque filigree.

The scale of “Fare Thee Well” was huge: not only record crowds of nearly 71,000 people each night at Soldier Field, but also simulcasts in theaters nationwide, pay-per-view webcasts, satellite-radio broadcasts and postconcert replays from the Chicago radio station WXRT. DVDs and CDs are planned for the fall.

Yet as pricey and lucrative as the events were — stadium ticket sales alone brought in $40 million — the concerts didn’t feel like a cash grab. This Grateful Dead could have worked up one set of crowd favorites and played it five times. Instead, it learned dozens of songs, not only longtime concert staples but rarities like “Mason’s Children,” which never appeared on a Dead studio album, and extended dramas like “Lost Sailor.” In its five concerts, the band repeated only two songs: “Cumberland Blues” and “Truckin’,” which, in Sunday night’s farewell concert, allowed the fans to shout one last time, “What a long, strange trip it’s been!”