A look back at the evolution of the event, now celebrating its 70th year, and how risk-taking has kept it ahead of the game

Sacrifice in the name of art was more than just a noble sounding idea when Edinburgh first opened its doors to performers and artists from across the world seven decades ago.

The war had been over for only two years and rationing was still in place. A grand plan to place floodlights around the castle, the city’s imposing landmark, was banned by the minister for fuel and power. But the people of Edinburgh rebelled. Hundreds of letters and telegrams from its citizens made it clear that many of them were prepared to give up their private share of coal if it would ensure the castle could be seen by visitors arriving at dusk.

This weekend a spectacular modern lighting display in Edinburgh’s elegant new town set out to stage the same sort of brilliant welcome for tourists and participants at the start of the 70th arts festival. It featured 1,000 projections of flowers to represent the fertility of creativity after the aridity of war.

The lights did not please everyone. Some fringe groups argued that the requisitioning of a city square for the sponsored event had drawn people away from small comedy venues that operate on the edge of financial viability. The celebratory illuminations did at least make it graphically clear what an extraordinary burden of international hope the festival carries.

Sir Andrew Davis, who was due on Sunday to conduct Wagner’s opera Die Walküre at Edinburgh’s Usher Hall, believes Britain should be proud of the festival’s 70 year mission “because it showcases what we can do, we humans, we musicians, we artists”.

Davis, 73, had a long association with Edinburgh, he told the Observer as he finished rehearsals. “Andrew Moore, the festival’s head of music, told me of all the conductors appearing this year I am the one who performed here first. I came in the 1970s with the American pianist Richard Goode when we were both young.”

The conductor added that the city’s true charm was its cosmopolitan attitude: “It is more international in flavour than the [BBC] Proms somehow, although there is plenty of foreign involvement with both.”

Down the years audiences attending the official and supposedly more formal international festival, as opposed to the fringe, have frequently been faced with challenges: they have been presented with Macbeth in Polish, a Chinese version of Coriolanus that featured a heavy metal band, and, in 1963, an alarming theatrical stunt involving a nude model being wheeled across the organ gallery of the McEwan Hall, courtesy of an avant-garde director from Los Angeles named Kenneth Dewey.

The informal fringe festival, also 70 this summer, is open to allcomers and all persuasions, but is sometimes quite hard pushed to beat its supposedly sensible twin sister’s taste for unconventional entertainment. All the same, from Jerry Springer – the Opera in 2002, to the controversial show that represented the life of Christ as a gay man, the fringe has its own proud history of fearless freedom and cultural exchange. It has also, perhaps most famously, launched hundreds of comedic careers, from Peter Cook to The Mighty Boosh and Jo Brand.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest At the first Edinburgh Festival in 1947, are, from left, violinist Joseph Szigeti, violist William Primrose, pianist Artur Schnabel and cellist Pierre Fournier. Photograph: Gerti Deutsch/Getty Images

If Edinburgh’s festivals have now survived seven decades into old age, their infancy was certainly not marked by the “mewling” of Shakespeare’s seven ages of man, but by a determined struggle for understanding between nations through art.

The plan for an arts festival was first announced in Scottish newspapers just as the war ended and it provoked heavy correspondence, mostly in favour. The original idea, the so-called “spirit of 47” now chosen as the theme of 11 days of opening events in the city, was actually born of a financial crisis at Glyndebourne, the Sussex opera company run by Rudolf Bing, who became festival’s first director. Looking for feasible new projects, Bing had noted the devastation of the major European music festival cities, Salzburg and Munich, and so he sought to build a safe haven of culture in Scotland.

The curtain eventually went up on the first festival on 24 August 1947 when Sir John Falconer, the lord provost of Edinburgh and the festival’s first chairman, announced a cultural event that would cross borders and “provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit”. Dancers from Sadler’s Wells, actors from the Old Vic and singers from Glyndebourne all took the train up to Edinburgh to perform.

The Edinburgh military tattoo, a noisy musical display of soldiering prowess staged at the foot of the castle, came along soon afterwards. It was the result of an experimental 1950 festival finale in which a musical fireworks night was staged above the Mound. Conductor Sir Thomas Beecham is said to have led the massed military bands from below the castle ramparts wearing an antique helmet. The barnstorming show swiftly established itself in the following years as the biggest attraction for many of the daytrippers arriving by coach.

The parallel fringe arts festival had also bubbled up immediately as a kind of antidote, or, more generously, a piquant accompaniment to the highbrow fare of the main festival. Eight excluded theatre groups, including the Edinburgh College of Art Theatre and the Lanchester Marionette Theatre, arrived in the city with un-programmed shows and set about performing for people anyway.

The fringe’s modern reputation as a crucial base camp for any comic performer planning an ascent of the entertainment industry came about almost by accident. In 1960 a gap in the programming at the Lyceum theatre, an official festival venue, was seized upon by artistic director Robert Ponsonby as a way to bring satire to the main festival and to prove to the rival fringe performers that it knew how to be irreverent. Four young Oxbridge graduates, Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore, brought a comedy revue, Beyond the Fringe, to the festival and changed the shape of British comedy for years to come. The show went on to play to full houses in the West End and then on Broadway.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jenny Eclaire, who won the Perrier comedy award at Edinburgh in 1995. Photograph: Rex

Even today the official festival competes with the fringe’s record for unconventional theatrical innovation. The fringe may now have staged shows underwater and in boxing rings, but it was a 1948 performance of A Satire of The Three Estates at the Assembly Hall which is credited with the introduction of the apron stage, allowing actors to perform among the audience, while in 1970 Teatro Libero’s show Orlando Furioso was largely staged on the ice rink at Murrayfield. Perhaps the most unexpected development of all though, has been the recent and growing weightiness of the fringe shows, from standups who tackle death, illness or feminism, to new amateur plays this year on state surveillance and fertility and a piece of verbatim theatre called Cherry about the pressure students feel to loose their virginity.

For the acclaimed British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, who has returned to the festival this year for a restaging of his opera Greek, based on Steven Berkoff’s play, Edinburgh still stands out for the variety of its productions and its risk-taking.

“When my opera was first put on here 29 years ago it really set my career off,” he said. “It was quite amazing to have it in the main festival. I have not been back with my own work until now, but I have been up loads of times as an audience member and what I love is that the audience take risks too. They see things here that they perhaps would not try anywhere else.”

For one of the producers of Beijing’s China Goes Pop! show, part of a new series of Chinese work on the fringe, the feeling is much the same. “Even though I didn’t know the difference between the fringe and the international festival until this year, Edinburgh is famous among my friends in China,” said Wang Lu. “It is a place for people to see work from around the world,” she added.

Now in their venerable “seventh age”, both festivals must continue to deliver on this youthful promise for the millions of international visitors who come to the city on a kind of cultural pilgrimage.

In a fitting reference to the opening concert of 1947, which began with Haydn’s “Surprise” symphony No 94, the same piece opened the international festival’s first concert on Saturday night. It was also a nod of respect to the vital element of the unexpected, which has proved the best way to keep the festival spirit alive.

1947 a 33-year-old Alec Guinness appeared in Richard III in the inaugural festival, which also included the Glyndebourne Opera, the Vienna Philharmonic led by Bruno Walter, and the singer Kathleen Ferrier

1957 Yehudi Menuhin takes music out to small venues around the city to reach younger audiences as opera diva Maria Callas scandalises critics by leaving after her four contracted performances of Sonnambula.

1960 The Lyceum Theatre gives birth to modern satire: Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore apear in the revue Beyond the Fringe.

1965 International festival director Lord Harewood founds what becomes the Edinburgh Festival Chorus. An 11 year Donald Runnicles sings in Mahler’s symphony No.8 at the opening concert and returns in 1994 to conduct the same piece.

1971 The 25th festival opens with a free concert was for the people of Edinburgh. On the fringe, comedians Billy Connolly and Jasper Carrot move over from the folk scene.

1980 Stand-up acts Tony Allen and Alexie Sayle begin their comic assault on the fringe at the Heriot-Watt Theatre.

1994-5 Contemporary choreographer Pina Bausch’s production of Nelken is hailed as a masterpiece. A year earlier, Baz Lurhrmann’s production of Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream is also feted.

2002 Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas’s acerbic take on confessional television culture Jerry Springer: the Opera, takes the fringe and then Britain by storm. It will finally goes to New York next year (2018).

2006 Director John Tiffany triumphs on the fringe with Black Watch, a play about soldiers in Iraq staged in an officer’s training drill hall.

2014-5 Danish star of The Killing Sofie Gråbøl appears as a Scottish queen in Rona Munro’s James Plays a year before actor and Director Simon McBurney premieres his hit experimental show The Encounter at the International Festival.