The story
Edinburgh International Festival in Edinburgh
Founded in 1947 to help rebuild European cultural life after the war, the Edinburgh International Festival programs a curated August season of world-class opera, classical music, theatre, and dance across the city's grandest venues, offering a more formal, artistic-director-selected counterpart to the sprawling, open-access Fringe that grew up alongside it.
When Rudolf Bing and a handful of collaborators launched the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947, barely two years after the Second World War ended, the idea was almost defiant: bring the world's great orchestras, opera companies, and theatre troupes to a city that had sat out the worst of the bombing, and use culture to help stitch a fractured continent back together.