The 10 Most Spectacular Performing Arts Festivals in The World

Mozart's birthplace hosts one of the world's most prestigious classical music festivals each summer, staging opera, orchestral concerts, and theatre across venues from the grand Felsenreitschule - a riding school carved into a cliff face - to smaller baroque halls.

Founded in 1920 and still run to famously exacting standards, tickets for its top opera productions are among the hardest and most expensive in classical music to secure.

Each July, France's Avignon Festival turns the walled papal city into Europe's biggest stage for contemporary theatre, with the main programme performing in the Palais des Papes' medieval courtyard alongside hundreds of independent Fringe shows filling every spare room and courtyard in town.

Founded in 1947 to bring serious theatre beyond Paris, it now draws well over a thousand productions across three weeks, more than any visitor could see.

Prague Spring opens every year on the same date - the anniversary of composer Bedrich Smetana's death - with a ceremonial performance of his symphonic cycle Ma vlast in the Smetana Hall, before three weeks of orchestral concerts by international ensembles fill the city's grandest halls.

Founded in 1946, it remains one of Europe's most respected classical music festivals, with the Rudolfinum among its most beautiful venues.

Held over a full month each summer in Denpasar, the Bali Arts Festival gathers traditional dance, gamelan orchestras, shadow puppetry, and crafts from villages across the island into one showcase, opened with a parade of regional delegations in ceremonial dress.

Unlike festivals built around foreign headline acts, this one exists to keep Balinese Hindu performing arts alive for local audiences, with tourists welcome as spectators.

Second only to Edinburgh in size, Adelaide's Fringe fills the South Australian capital with comedy, cabaret, circus, and theatre across hundreds of pop-up and permanent venues each austral summer.

The Garden of Unearthly Delights, a temporary carnival-like hub of tents and string lights in the city's East Park Lands, anchors much of the programme, and the whole festival runs alongside the more traditional, curated Adelaide Festival.

Every February and March, Hong Kong Arts Festival brings international opera, theatre, and dance companies to venues across the city alongside new work by local artists, positioning itself as a bridge between Western and Chinese performing arts traditions.

Programming spans the grand Cultural Centre auditorium to smaller black-box theatres, with commissioned pieces that often blend Cantonese opera technique with contemporary staging.

Tucked into the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, Jacob's Pillow has hosted a summer dance festival on the same rural farmstead since 1933, making it the longest-running dance festival in the United States.

Companies spanning ballet, contemporary, and world dance perform across an intimate wooden theatre and outdoor stages, with free daily talks and showings that make top-tier dance accessible without a ticket.

Every August, Edinburgh's Old Town becomes the world's largest arts festival, with thousands of comedy, theatre and street performances crammed into venues from grand halls to converted cupboards, while the Royal Mile fills with performers touting shows to passers-by.

It began in 1947 when eight companies turned up uninvited to the official Edinburgh International Festival.

For two weeks each autumn, this small Irish port town stages rare and forgotten operas rather than the standard repertoire, giving neglected works their first outings in decades inside an intimate purpose-built opera house that seats under 800.

The scale keeps it intensely social - singers, musicians, and audiences share the same small-town pubs after every performance - in a way the big opera houses of London or Vienna never quite manage.

England's largest annual multi-arts festival fills Brighton each May with theatre, dance, music, and visual art across the seaside city's theatres, churches, and public spaces, alongside the fringe-style Brighton Festival Fringe running in parallel.

A different guest artistic director curates the programme each year, while the free outdoor Children's Parade and Artists' Open Houses trail draw crowds beyond ticketed shows.