The story
Buxton International Festival in Buxton
An opera and literature festival held each July in the Derbyshire spa town of Buxton, founded in 1979 around the restored Edwardian Buxton Opera House. Known for staging rarely performed or unusual opera rather than standard repertoire, it added a literary series in 2000 alongside its core music programming.
Buxton's international festival dates its modern form to July 1979, when Malcolm Fraser, then head of opera at the Royal Northern College of Music, worked with Welsh National Opera conductor Anthony Hose to realise a longstanding vision: turning the town's Buxton Opera House, an ornate Edwardian building that had spent most of its life as a cinema rather than a working theatre, into the home of an annual opera festival.