How to survive the Festival

In the old days, if I may call them that, the week before  the start of the Edinburgh Festival was a time of anticipation. Princes Street, as you walked along it, seemed to have new atmosphere. Our batteries were about to be recharged. Exhilaration was in the air.

But the Festival was a much more clear-cut event at that time than it is now. The Fringe had not begun to sweep like a great tidal wave over everything in its path. Proceeding down the Royal Mile, you did not want to turn and flee.Though there were new faces everywhere, they did not overcrowd the city as we knew it.

Today the “official” festival has to be called the EIF to differentiate it from the rest. Too much has become not enough. The closing concert, with Giulini to conduct it, used to be an event. Now it tends to seem like just another concert.

Again, in the old days, I used to be asked what I planned toto do after the Festival. Keep my spirits up  was an immediate way to face the problem. Go to another festival was the way I solved it every year. It was one of the good things about being a music critic.  I was paid to go elsewhere and write about it. So, more often than not, I went straight to the Berlin Festival for operatic treats to match Edinburgh’s. The best year of all was when I spent a week in Berlin, then flew to Vienna to join the Scottish National Orchestra on its first major foreign tour, writing every night for three weeks, phoning my reviews to Edinburgh (a greatly time-consuming process in the days before computers) and chronicling the orchestra’s adventures  everywhere.

Peter Diamand once told me that he was baffled that that was how I wanted to lead my life after the Edinburgh Festival. He himself went to Peebles Hydro to recover. But then, as festival director, he had tensions and  obligations very different from mine.
2 September 2014