Edinburgh International Festival and Fringe: Two Different August Institutions

Every August, visitors to Edinburgh discover that “the festival” is really several festivals at once, and that the two oldest are run on almost opposite principles. The Edinburgh International Festival is a curated programme of orchestras, opera, theatre and dance, chosen by a single director and staged in the city’s great halls and theatres. The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, born the same summer in 1947, chooses nothing at all: anyone with a show and a venue willing to host it may take part. Understanding how the two differ makes August in Edinburgh far easier to navigate, and it is the backdrop to our Edinburgh Festival Fringe small group tour, which spends eight nights in the city while both are under way.

What is the difference between the Edinburgh International Festival and the Fringe?

The International Festival is curated and the Fringe is open access. The International Festival’s director invites the artists and builds the programme, which centres on classical music, opera, theatre and dance. The Fringe has no artistic director and no selection committee, so its programme is made up of every show that has found a venue and registered. The organisation behind the Fringe, the Festival Fringe Society, runs no venues of its own; it publishes the programme and sells the tickets.

1947: one festival planned, another uninvited

The Edinburgh International Festival grew out of the ideas of Rudolf Bing, the general manager of the Glyndebourne opera festival and, as the festival itself records, a Jewish refugee from the Nazi regime. With the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, John Falconer, the city council and the British Council, he helped shape a festival whose purpose went well beyond entertainment. Two years after the Second World War, its founders wanted great art to reach across the political and cultural divisions that had just torn Europe apart. The festival still speaks of its founding vision as a platform for the flowering of the human spirit.

The first season made that purpose audible. On 11 September 1947, in the Usher Hall, Bruno Walter conducted the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with the British singers Kathleen Ferrier and Peter Pears as soloists. Walter had been Mahler’s assistant before the composer’s death in 1911, and he had left Europe for the United States when life under the Nazis became intolerable. The concert reunited him with the orchestra he had once conducted, and Opera Scotland’s archive counts it among the most historically important musical events of that first festival. The 1947 souvenir programme also lists the Hallé Orchestra, the conductor John Barbirolli, the pianist Artur Schnabel and the violinist Joseph Szigeti among that year’s performers.

Not everyone who came had been asked. Eight theatre groups arrived without a place in the official programme and performed on the edges of the festival regardless. That uninvited gesture is the origin of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, and it set the pattern for everything the Fringe became: independent of the International Festival, unprogrammed and open to anyone prepared to find a room and an audience.

How the Edinburgh International Festival is run

The Edinburgh International Festival is a registered Scottish charity and a company limited by guarantee. Its programme is the responsibility of a Festival Director, and the list of those who have held the post is a short history of the festival’s changing character. Rudolf Bing ran the first three festivals. Peter Diamand led it from 1966 to 1978, Sir Brian McMaster from 1992 to 2006, Sir Jonathan Mills from 2006 and Fergus Linehan from 2014. The current director, Nicola Benedetti, took up the post in October 2022.

Each director shapes a programme that the festival describes as hand-picked. Its stated aim is to offer the deepest experience of the highest quality art to the broadest possible audience. The festival also presents new work: in 2025 its programme included seven world premieres, alongside UK, Scottish and European premieres.

Its venues are some of the most handsome in the city. The festival lists twelve, among them the Usher Hall, the Festival Theatre, the King’s Theatre, The Lyceum and The Queen’s Hall, as well as the University of Edinburgh’s neoclassical Playfair Library, which suits smaller recitals. Its headquarters, The Hub, sits at the top of the Royal Mile on Castlehill. It was built between 1839 and 1844 as a church for the Tolbooth congregation and a meeting hall for the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, and its 240-foot spire still dominates the upper Old Town. After standing empty from 1984, it was converted for the festival and opened in 1999. Our guide to Edinburgh’s main sights covers the Royal Mile around it in more depth.

Is there support for disabled visitors at the International Festival?

Yes. In 2025 the International Festival issued 7,271 free or heavily discounted tickets to D/deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people, and its Access Pass scheme had more than 2,000 members. It also staged its first dementia-friendly concert. The Fringe reports that 60 per cent of its 2025 shows were in level-access venues and that it issued nearly 25,000 tickets through its access ticketing service, so check access details for each venue before booking.

What kind of performances does the International Festival present?

Mainly large-scale classical music, opera, theatre and dance, performed by invited international companies and soloists in seated, ticketed theatres and concert halls. In 2025 more than 2,000 artists and participants from over 40 countries took part, and 66 performances sold out. Check the current programme on the festival’s own website, as the line-up changes completely each year.

How the Fringe is run

The Fringe needed a structure of its own once the number of independent performers grew, and in 1958 the Festival Fringe Society was created. It published a programme of Fringe shows and set up a central box office, and from the start its constitution said it would take no part in vetting what appeared. That principle has not changed. The Society, today a registered charity, states that it does not run any venues or programme any performers, and that no individual or committee decides who can take part.

Instead, the Fringe is assembled from thousands of independent agreements between performers and venues. The Society’s own work is to publish the programme, website and app, sell tickets for every show, support artists and market the festival. Venue operators and the companies themselves decide what plays where.

How does a show get into the Fringe?

By finding a venue willing to host it and then registering. The Fringe Society requires a venue agreement before a show can be registered, after which the company completes the listing, pays the registration fee and approves a proof before tickets go on sale. There is no audition and no artistic selection by the Society. This is why the Fringe can range from student productions and first-time solo shows to established international companies within a few streets.

Two models in one city

The numbers show how differently the two festivals are built. In 2025 the International Festival welcomed over 111,000 people to a carefully chosen programme. The Fringe that same summer listed 3,893 shows in 301 venues, with work from 62 countries, and the Fringe Society estimates that more than 2.6 million tickets were issued. One festival concentrates resources on a relatively small number of ambitious productions; the other multiplies opportunities across thousands of rooms.

Each model has its strengths and its critics. A curated festival can commission new work, bring an entire opera company or a full symphony orchestra to the city, and set performances in conversation with one another, but it depends on the judgement of one director and a limited number of seats. An open-access festival gives anyone a chance to be seen, and many writers, comedians and companies have used it as a first step, but it asks a great deal of performers, who must find and secure their own venue, and of audiences, who have to choose among thousands of unfamiliar titles.

The two also share the same streets and the same weeks. A concert at the Usher Hall may end just as a late Fringe comedy show begins in a basement nearby, and many visitors move between both in a single day. Beyond them are the other August festivals, including the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo on the Castle Esplanade, the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Edinburgh Art Festival, which together give the city its reputation as a festival city.

Can you see International Festival and Fringe shows on the same trip?

Yes, because both run in August and their dates largely overlap. On the tour, tickets to four Fringe performances are arranged for you, and two free days leave room to add International Festival concerts, opera or theatre, which you book separately through the festival’s own box office. The most sought-after International Festival performances can sell out, so it is worth booking as soon as the programme is announced.

Looking ahead: a new concert hall

The International Festival may soon gain a new principal venue for music. The Dunard Centre, a 1,000-seat concert hall designed by David Chipperfield Architects, is planned for St Andrew Square in the New Town, behind Dundas House, as a principal venue for the festival. It would be Edinburgh’s first new purpose-built concert hall in about a century. Construction has been delayed, and a March 2025 report put the opening in early 2029, so treat any date as provisional.

Experiencing both festivals with a small group

For a first visit, the hardest part of August in Edinburgh is choosing. The tour is designed to make that easier. It opens with an orientation walk and a Fringe orientation with the Program Leader, includes tickets to four Fringe performances chosen once the festival programme is published, and adds visits to the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Museum of Scotland. Free days leave room for the International Festival, or for wandering into a Fringe show you knew nothing about an hour before. Walking is graded Level 1, Introductory to Moderate, with around 3 to 5 kilometres a day, some of it on the Old Town’s uneven, sloping streets.

For more on the city beyond the festival venues, our guide to places to visit in Edinburgh off the beaten track suggests quieter corners, and our country spotlight on Scotland sets the capital in its national context. To hear both the curated and the uninvited sides of Edinburgh’s August in one visit, with tickets arranged and a Program Leader on hand, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Small Group Tour travels with up to 16 travellers, and solo travellers are always welcome.