John Drummond, 71; Former Director of Edinburgh Festival
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John Drummond, 71, former director of the Edinburgh Festival who also produced television arts programs and programmed music for the BBC, died Wednesday of an unspecified illness.
The highlight of his five-year term at the Edinburgh arts festival was his last season, 1983, when he staged a celebration of Vienna 1900, which connected Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh with Viennese painter Gustav Klimt and composers Arnold Schoenberg and Gustav Mahler and psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, crossing all disciplinary lines into music, drama, literature and intellectual currents.
Drummond was born in London in 1934 to a Scottish sea captain and an Australian singer. He was educated at Trinity College at Cambridge, where he developed a lifelong dedication to the arts and nurtured his interests in music, dance, theater and opera.
He was knighted in 1995 for his contributions to music.
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