EDlNBURGH's Festival sprang more from charity than from love of harmony." So wrote Lord Cockburn, greeting the 1815 "music festival" marking military victory in Europe. It attracted 4,000 people and numbered Walter Scott among its patrons.
In 1947 Rudolf Bing inaugurated the contemporary Festival. He stated that its purpose was to celebrate peace. He saw Edinburgh as "a lighthouse of culture in a world where shortly before human decency seemed on the verge of extinction". As a symbol of the times he applied for permission to "floodlight" the Castle. The Minister for Fuel and Power banned the notion but was overruled by other politicians, to public acclaim.
To mark the fiftieth Festival last year the budget for buntings across the city was cut. Political hustling began. Sponsors stepped in. Flags flew for the three weeks in August.
Marketing is the charitable host to harmony these days. Publications have flooded the shops of Edinburgh. They range from political tracts attacking Festival elitism to tacky promotional tapes for London-based publicity firms. Fortunately, as the titles under review show, there is also the beautiful, the celebratory, the informative and the argumentative.
Ruth Wishart's Celebration draws superbly from the Festival Society's own archives. On thick, luscious paper are printed photographs in colour and black and white. Memories are regained, restored and elevated: Barbirolli in 1949; Peggy Ashcroft in 1958 reading Dylan Thomas; the great open-air Medea from Ninagawa in 1986; the mesmeric Mark Morris Dance Group over the last five years.
Journalist Wishart provides a minimal text; images are all. Eileen Miller is a scholar, and her record of the Festival is that of a researcher turned statistician. More than half her thoroughly documented book is a listing of all productions and their casts over the half century. This, for now, is the definitive history.
Of Irish interest: the Abbey features three times - The Playboy of the Western World (1966), King Oedipus (1974), and the rapturously acclaimed Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme (1995). The Gate have been invited twice - Juno and the Peacock (1987) and Salome (1989).
Yet both the Abbey and the Gate have appeared many times in Edinburgh's three-week autumnal culture frenzy, on the Fringe. It is open to all, and is non-selective. This is what establishes it as the largest arts event in the world. Last year saw 1,238 shows in 187 venues across the city, bringing in an audience of over two million. Alice Bain's attractive compilation of its history and highlights is a glorious evocation of experiences past relived and recounted - often to boring length by this reviewer - in times present.
But are the views of any reviewer important? Even one of twenty years experience? This is the question posed in American sociologist Wesley Shrum's ground-breaking Fringe and Fortune. As its subtitle states, it examines "the role of critics in high and popular art". Devastatingly, the young professor concludes that I and my fellow "witches and warlocks" reviewing for the Scotsman are near to useless in either promoting or denigrating a show. Audiences are motivated by fame and familiarity rather than judgement or opinion. The TV star and his dog in the Comedy Venue attracts, the erudite student production linking Marlowe's death to Shakespeare might as well haven stayed tight in Magdelene (pronounced maudlin).
Lord Cockburn would surely have been more charitable. Yet even he, faced with a Polish Macbeth, a Georgian Lear, Japanese absailers on the walls of his Council Chambers, and American ballet in his public schools, would have needed seriously to reconsider his understanding of harmony.