The Edinburgh Festival was founded as a response to war. The inaugural event, held in 1947, was the brainchild of Rudolf Bing, the manager of Glyndebourne Opera, and Henry Harvey Wood, a British Council grandee. Both were convinced that a festival of music and theatre was needed to restore the artistic heritage of Europe after six years of devastation. Edinburgh recommended itself as the host city because of its cultural prestige, its picturesque location (to rival Salzburg), and its ample store of theatres and hotels that could accommodate hundreds of performers and thousands of visitors. That the Luftwaffe hadn’t flattened the city was a significant mark in its favour. The festival set out to ‘provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit’. In other words, it was the NHS with a lyre in its hands.
Poachers swooped immediately. Eight opportunistic theatre companies arrived in the Scottish capital intending to lure audiences away from the festival proper and towards their own shows.
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