This year the Edinburgh International Festival is celebrating its 75th anniversary, but its historical antecedents go back more than 200 years to a seminal event which was hailed as a turning point in Scottish culture and established Edinburgh as a city of festivals. The first Edinburgh music festival took place in 1815, and owed its success to a Polish-Lithuanian migrant, Felix Yaniewicz (1762-1848). While a cornerstone marking his residence at 84 Great King Street in the New Town records his role as co-founder of the first festival, his story has remained untold until now.
The exhibition came about as a result of a chance discovery. In the autumn of 2019, one of Yaniewicz’s descendants came across an advertisement for a beautifully-restored square pianobearing the label ‘Yaniewicz & Green’. Inside the piano, a signature in Indian ink had been matched to my ancestor’s marriage
