As director and director, Pierre Audi had a unique antenna for visionary music theater

Next summer, Pierre Audi would simply walk around again in Aix-en-Provence as director of the opera festival that he has led since 2019. Supping with artists, drinking coffee with patrons, forging new plans. But Pierre Audi died unexpectedly from a heart attack in the night from Friday to Saturday. He was at work in Beijing, where one of his opera regions for re -execution was studied. Audi was 67 years old.

Restless creative, always and everywhere at work: the circumstances of his death are significant for the passionate drive that Audi was in its own. In recent years he combined the management of the festival in Aix-en-Provence and The Park Avenue Armory in New York with guest management all over the world. In Amsterdam, with his wife and their two school -going children, he also discovered domestic happiness at a little later age. But it didn’t come from the intention to take it a little quieter.

For the Brussels coin opera, Audi has been realizing Wagner’s Opera Vierguik over the past two seasons Der Ring des Nibelungen. He returned to the work with which he had achieved great success at the Dutch Opera. His work in Aix and New York was also in one line with what his life’s work was afterwards: thirty years at the helm of the Dutch Opera.

X-Factor

Audi’s appointment came as a surprise in 1988; An Dark Horse. As a French-Lebanese banker son, at the age of 23, after his studies in Oxford in London, he had founded the Almeida Theater and showed up with strong avant-garde theater. But what did he know about Opera?

Not very much yet – although in his youth he had visited many opera on the basis of his father. But Audi was it anyway. He had the X factor. The Dutch Opera was in a bad way, Audi’s predecessor Jan van Vlijmen had left financial deficits. A hot and booming Maker like Audi could give the newly opened new theater on Amsterdam Waterlooplein International. Audi also immediately said yes, he said later. « Even if I was only thirty and in Opera inexperienced, after ten years of London the timing was good. I had plans and a filled address book. »

The gamble turned out to be gold. In the approximately three thousand performances that were shown in the period of his artistic leadership, he actually turned the Dutch Opera into an internationally leading house, for many years in close collaboration with business leader Truze Lodder.

He soon started directing himself. In Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria (1990) and L’coronazione di Poppea (1993) He realized with primordial elements such as fire, stone, water and air representations that « focus on the core of human behavior, the characters in their mutual relationships, the essence of the drama, » said NRC. He kept that approach fairly consistent in the nearly fifty productions that he directed for the Dutch Opera between 1990 and 2022.

The most famous example is the often repeated staging of Wagner’s Opera Vierguik Der Ring des Nibelungen (1997-1998), with the orchestra on the stage. On the dramatic highlights you felt the flames on stage roast your eyebrows in the room: for those who were an unforgettable adventure.

Rather visionary than nostalgic

Audi brought operas from Berlioz, Monteverdi, Messiaen, Vivier, Schönberg, Wagner, De Grote Russen, Janácek. Belcanto, to the sorrow of enthusiasts, you saw for decades for decades. He prefers his and our attention to the innovative power of music theater and composers who were visionary in it – or from whom he suspected that they could be.

He seduced Alfred Schnittke to Life with an idiot (1992) and György Kurtag to Fin de Partie (2019), theater director Simon McBurney to his opera debut (A Dogs Heart2020). Visual artists such as Karel Appel, Jannis Kounellis,,  » Anish Kapoor and Georg Baselitz strict he strictly for making opera recess.

Between 2005 and 2014, Audi also became artistic director of the Holland Festival; A post he viewed as an extension of his work at the opera. He brought war musical War In addition to Prometeo from Avant-Gardist Luigi Nono-and with both full halls. A festival, he thought, had to offer unique experiences.

Tappiece of the Holland Festival period, although five years later, was prepared for a long time, Stockhausens aus light In 2019: a sample project with five hundred performers. That same summer also opened the first festival in Aix-en-Provence under Audi’s leadership spectacular, with Mozarts Requiem in chilling gloomy direction of Romeo Castellucci.

Audi showed what music theater means for him as a genre that can turn to empathy like no other. The documentary Three Acts (2024) Follows him in rehearsals of Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra, in Tokyo. He explains – with eighty own opera region on the clock – with now eighty again – what he thinks can be the current interest of Opera. « The world on stage brings contemporary problems closer than the news itself can. Because in the theater we dream, and it is precisely in that non-reality that we can enter into a deep connection with what we see. In a time that war and suffering are made openly, Opera offers hope. »

In Aix-en-Provence, the seventh edition of the festival compiled by Audi opens in July.

To share

Mail the editors