History
The first International Festival (and the first Edinburgh Festival Fringe, although it wasn't known as such until the following year) took place between 22 August and 11 September 1947, in the wake of the end of the Second World War, with an optimistic remit to "provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit" and enrich the cultural life of Scotland, Britain and Europe. The founders of the Festival included Rudolf Bing, the General Manager of Glyndebourne Opera Festival, Henry Harvey Wood, the 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 the Lord Provost Sir John Falconer. Bing, the moving spirit behind the enterprise, had looked at several English cities before settling on Edinburgh. The Festival has since taken place every August.
Read more about this topic: Edinburgh International Festival
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.”
—J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)