Llangollen International Eisteddfod

The Llangollen International Musical Eisteddfod is a music festival which takes place every year during the second week of July in Llangollen, North Wales. Singers and dancers from around the world are invited to take part in over 20 competitions followed each evening by concerts on the main stage. Over five thousand singers, dancers and instrumentalists from around 50 countries perform to audiences of more than 50,000 over the 6 days of the event.

Famous performers at Llangollen have included Luciano Pavarotti (who first competed in 1955 with his father and a choir from their home town Modena), Red Army Ensemble, Julian Lloyd Webber and Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The final Sunday Evening Gala Concert has featured Katherine Jenkins, Bryn Terfel, Kiri Te Kanawa, James Galway and Montserrat Caballe.

The origins of the International Eisteddfod go back to 1943 when Harold Tudor, an officer of the British Council, arranged a visit for members of governments-in-exile to the Welsh National Eisteddfod in Bangor. The excursion was well received especially by the noted writer and poet Juraj Slavik, the Minister for the Interior in the Czechoslovakia Government in Exile. Following the visit he wrote to Tudor praising the value of music as a way of healing the effects of War. The following year an international concert was held as part of the Llandybie National Eisteddfod.

Towards the end of 1945 Tudor proposed that an international choral festival be added to the 1947 Welsh National Eisteddfod, however the Council of the National Eisteddfod felt that as all their effort were involved in rebuilding their own organisation they could not take on such a scheme. Tudor modified his proposal into an independent music festival and found support for this idea from W. S. Gwynn Williams, Welsh composer and music publisher and George Northing, a teacher from Dinas Brân County School and chairman of Llangollen town council. Gwynn Williams and Northing both pressed for the Eisteddfod to be in their home town of Llangollen.

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