Edinburgh International Festival

Claudia Boyle and Robin Adams in The Last Hotel by Enda Walsh and Donnacha Dennehy, Edinburgh 2015

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.[2]

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.[3]

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.[4] 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 acclaim for the first time since 1552 in the Assembly Hall on the Mound.[5] The British Army's desire to showcase itself during the Festival period led to the independent staging of the first Edinburgh Military Tattoo, featuring displays of piping and dancing, in 1950. This annual event has come to be regarded as an integral part of the official festival, though it continues to be organised separately.[6]

The 240-foot-high spire of the Hub, seen from Johnston Terrace

In 1999, the Festival opened a new central box office and information centre in The Hub, a converted church on Castlehill, directly below Edinburgh Castle. Originally built as the Tollbooth Church (1842–44) to house the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, its tall Gothic spire is the highest point in central Edinburgh (outside of the Castle) and a landmark visible for miles around.

The Edinburgh International Festival was brought forward to coincide with the Fringe in 2015.[7]

All Edinburgh festivals were cancelled in 2020 due to the ongoing Coronavirus pandemic. [8]

The principal venues of the Festival are:

• The Edinburgh Playhouse (capacity 3,059)
• Usher Hall (2,300)
• Festival Theatre (1,915), primarily used for opera and ballet productions.
• Kings Theatre (1,300)
• The Queen's Hall (920)
• Royal Lyceum Theatre (650)
• The Hub (420)

• 1947–49: Sir Rudolf Bing
• 1950–55: Sir Ian Bruce Hope Hunter
• 1956–1960: Robert Noel Ponsonby
• 1961–65: George Henry Hubert Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood
• 1966–1978: Peter Diamand
• 1979–1983: Sir John Richard Gray Drummond
• 1984–1991: Frank Dunlop
• 1992–2006: Sir Brian McMaster
• October 2006–2014: Sir Jonathan Mills
• October 2014–present: Fergus Linehan

About ten other festivals are held in Edinburgh at about the same time as the International Festival. Collectively, the entire group is referred to as the Edinburgh Festival. Most notable of these is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, which started as an offshoot of the International Festival and has since grown to be the world's largest arts festival. The Edinburgh International Film Festival also began in August 1947 with a programme of documentary films. In the 1990s this festival moved into June. The 1966 Writers' Festival begun by John Calder, Richard Demarco, Jim Haynes, founders of the Paperback Bookshop and Traverse Theatre, eventually led to the Edinburgh International Book Festival also staged in August. The result is festivals with more than 2,500 performances and events per day in Edinburgh in August, many times bigger than the next biggest arts festivals anywhere in the world, in a major city where uniquely for a month culture is said to be bigger than shopping.

The following works received their world premiere at the Edinburgh International Festival:

• List of opera festivals

• Bruce, G., Festival in the North: The Story of the Edinburgh Festival. Hale, 1975.
• Miller, E., The Edinburgh International Festival, 1947 – 1996. Scholar Press: Aldershot, 1996.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Edinburgh International Festival.

• Official website
• Official Festivals Guide to all 12 festivals that take place in Edinburgh
• Listings and reviews at The List
• Fest Magazine, a free and independent Edinburgh Festival magazine
• ThreeWeeks a guide to the Edinburgh Festival
• A History of the Edinburgh Festivals
• Edinburgh Festival Classroom resources
• National Library of Scotland: SCOTTISH SCREEN ARCHIVE (selection of archive films about the Edinburgh Festival)