page_title: Edinburgh International Festival
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Edinburgh International Festival / History
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: A New Opera by Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh Edinburgh International Festival André de Ridder Conductor
context_page_description: The Edinburgh International Festival is an annual festival of performing arts in Edinburgh, Scotland, over three weeks in August. By invitation from the Festival Director, the International Festival brings top class performers of music, theatre, opera and dance from around the world to perform. The festival also hosts a series of visual art exhibitions, talks and workshops. The first International Festival took place between 22 August and 11 September 1947. The Festival has since taken place every August since then, except for August 2020 due to the Covid-19 Pandemic.
context_section_description: The idea of a Festival with a remit to "provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit" and enrich the cultural life of Scotland, Britain and Europe took form in the wake of the Second World War. The idea of creating an international festival within the UK was first conceived by Rudolf Bing, the General Manager of Glyndebourne Opera Festival, the arts patron Lady Rosebery, theatre director Sir Tyrone Guthrie, and Audrey Mildmay (wife of John Christie) during a wartime tour of a small-scale Glyndebourne production of The Beggar's Opera.
  Rudolf Bing conceived of the festival to heal the wounds of war through the languages of the arts. This is its principal raison d’être. It was first financed by Lord Roseberry with the £10,000 winnings of his horse Ocean Swell that won the only two major horse-races run in wartime including the Jockey Gold Cup in 1944. This sum was matched by Edinburgh Town Council and then some money in turn was matched by the Arts Council of Great Britain formed by Lord Keynes at war's end. Bing also co-founded the Festival with Henry Harvey Wood, Head of the British Council in Scotland, Sidney Newman, Reid Professor of Music at Edinburgh University, and a group of civic leaders from the City of Edinburgh, in particular Sir John Falconer.
  Bing had looked at several English cities before shifting his focus to Scotland and settling on Edinburgh, a city he had visited and admired in 1939. In particular, Edinburgh's castle reminded him of Salzburg where he had been the festival director before the war. Harvey Wood described the meeting at which the idea was hatched:
  The Edinburgh International Festival of Music and Drama was first discussed over a lunch table in a restaurant in Hanover Square, London, towards the end of 1944. Rudolf Bing, convinced that musical and operatic festivals on anything like the pre-war scale were unlikely to be held in any of the shattered and impoverished centres for many years to come, was anxious to consider and investigate the possibility of staging such a Festival somewhere in the United Kingdom in the summer of 1946. He was convinced and he convinced my colleagues and myself that such an enterprise, successfully conducted, might at this moment of European time, be of more than temporary significance and might establish in Britain a centre of world resort for lovers of music, drama, opera, ballet and the graphic arts.
  Certain preconditions were obviously required of such a centre. It should be a town of reasonable size, capable of absorbing and entertaining anything between 50,000 and 150,000 visitors over a period of three weeks to a month. It should, like Salzburg, have considerable scenic and picturesque appeal and it should be set in a country likely to be attractive to tourists and foreign visitors. It should have sufficient number of theatres, concert halls and open spaces for the adequate staging of a programme of an ambitious and varied character. Above all it should be a city likely to embrace the opportunity and willing to make the festival a major preoccupation not only in the City Chambers but in the heart and home of every citizen, however modest. Greatly daring but not without confidence I recommended Edinburgh as the centre and promised to make preliminary investigations.
  Wood approached Falconer, who enthusiastically welcomed the initiative on behalf of the city.  As it was too late to finalise arrangements for 1946, plans were made for the following year. The first International Festival (and the first "Festival Fringe", although not known as such in the first year) took place between 22 August and 11 September 1947. The Festival has since taken place every August.
  The first Festival concentrated mainly on classical music, a highlight being concerts given by the Vienna Philharmonic, reunited with their erstwhile conductor Bruno Walter, who had left Europe after the Nazi occupation of his homeland.  The Festival's first dramatic success came in the following year when an adaptation of Sir David Lyndsay's The Thrie Estaites was performed to great accla
caption: Claudia Boyle and Robin Adams in The Last Hotel by Enda Walsh and Donnacha Dennehy, Edinburgh 2015
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "806", "Image ImageLength": "1207", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Make": "NIKON CORPORATION", "Image Model": "NIKON D800", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "220", "Image YResolution": "220", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CC (Macintosh)", "Image DateTime": "2015:08:21 18:43:02", "Image ExifOffset": "284", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1090", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "4406", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/60", "EXIF FNumber": "71/10", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Manual", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "800", "EXIF SensitivityType": "Recommended Exposure Index", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0221", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2015:08:06 20:41:21", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2015:08:06 20:41:21", "EXIF ShutterSpeedValue": "5906891/1000000", "EXIF ApertureValue": "2827819/500000", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "4", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "120", "EXIF SubSecTime": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeOriginal": "00", "EXIF SubSecTimeDigitized": "00", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "687", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1029", "EXIF FocalPlaneXResolution": "16780511/8192", "EXIF FocalPlaneYResolution": "16780511/8192", "EXIF FocalPlaneResolutionUnit": "3", "EXIF SensingMethod": "One-chip color area", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CVAPattern": "[2, 0, 2, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2]", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Manual Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF FocalLengthIn35mmFilm": "120", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF GainControl": "Low gain up", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF SubjectDistanceRange": "0", "EXIF BodySerialNumber": "6114881", "EXIF LensSpecification": "[24, 120, 4, 4]", "EXIF LensModel": "24.0-120.0 mm f/4.0"}