On The Death of Pierre Audi

The French-Lebanese theater director and stage director Pierre Audi died unexpectedly in Beijing on the night of May 3 at the age of just 67. The international opera world mourns the loss of a globally recognized and sought-after theater maker, a highly imaginative director and one of the truly great facilitators of artistic partnerships.

Pierre Audi was born in Beirut in 1957, the son of a banker. The family later moved to Paris. Audi began directing while studying history at Oxford. In 1979, he founded the now legendary Almeida Theatre, which served as the premiere stage for Audi's International Festival of Contemporary Music and Performance. In 1988, Audi's path led him to Amsterdam, where he became artistic director of the Dutch National Opera (De Nationale Opera). The risk of appointing the largely unknown, still very young director paid off completely: Thanks to Audi, the Dutch National Opera became one of the most important players on the global opera scene. Audi left his mark on the company for a full thirty years and also left a lasting impression as the director of a Monteverdi, a Mozart and a Ring cycle.

Pierre Audi has staged productions worldwide at such major opera houses as the Metropolitan Opera, the Vienna State Opera and La Scala in Milan, as well as at the Salzburg Festival and the Ruhrtriennale. From 2005 to 2014, Audi was Artistic Director of the Holland Festival. In 2018, he took over the directorship of the Aix-en-Provence Festival and breathed new artistic life into the most important French festival. He was also Artistic Director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York - thanks to Pierre Audi, the former arsenal mutated into a meeting place for the world's most important visual and performing artists.

Audi has staged three productions at the Bayerische Staatsoper, and the three works outline the director's entire range. In 1997, he staged a world premiere, Hans Werner Henze's Venus und Adonis, based on a libretto by Hans-Ulrich Treichel, who was highly esteemed by the composer. This was followed in 2008 by a baroque opera: in Georg Friedrich Händel's Tamerlano, the focus was on reduction and the resulting psychological depth of the characters. His production of Richard Wagner's Parsifal is still in the repertoire of the Bavarian State Opera and to a certain extent is symptomatic of the third component of Audi's work: his collaboration with visual artists. For Parsifal at the Nationaltheater in 2018, the painter, graphic artist and sculptor Georg Baselitz contributed the stage design to Pierre Audi's cleverly restrained direction. The result was a haunting portrayal of an oppressive dystopia.

Dogmatism was completely alien to Pierre Audi, this always alert and extremely clever, restless spirit. He remained curious to the very end, was open to all artistic developments and brought many a directorial trend to a deeper, timeless truth. Great directorial personalities such as Romeo Castellucci and Peter Greenaway found their way to opera through him. He repeatedly championed new opera works and often staged them himself, including such prominent names as Tan Dun, Kaija Saariaho, Pascal Dusapin, Louis Andriessen, György Kurtág and Alfred Schnittke.

Pierre Audi recently spent time in Beijing, where he was preparing a takeover of one of his productions. This tireless opera mentor and creator, who can be mentioned in the same breath as greats such as Rolf Liebermann or Gerard Mortier, has now closed his eyes forever. Nevertheless, his work lives on, and we will see that his traces will remain visible for a long time to come: in the productions that can be seen all over the world, in the works he initiated, in the artistic partnerships he initiated. Let us be grateful to Pierre Audi from the bottom of our hearts.

Dr. Olaf Roth