Ha fallecido Pierre Audi

'Tosca' según Audi © Svetlana Loboff / OnP, 2019

El director escénico y gerente operístico Pierre Audi (Beirut, 1957; Beijing, 2025) falleció repentinamente el pasado sábado 3 de mayo en Beijing -donde preparaba la reposición de una de sus producciones- por causas que aún no se han dado a conocer. 

Desde el principio de su carrera -un montaje teatral de Shakespeare en Oxford en 1977- y sobre todo tras fundar el Teatro Almeida en Londres en 1979, Audi se mostró un firme partidario de la renovación teatral y operística, tarea que mantuvo hasta la actualidad. Su larga etapa al frente de la Ópera Nacional de los Países Bajos (1988-2018) y del Holland Festival (2005-2014) fueron etapas decisivas de su carrera y en los últimos años -desde 2019- ha convertido el Festival d’Aix-en-Provence en una de las citas más importantes del panorama veraniego operístico, compitiendo con festivales tan 'clásicos' y prestigiosos como Salzburgo o Bayreuth. De hecho, cuando el año pasado el Festival de d’Aix-en-Provence terminó su edición 2024 con un importante déficit económico (más de 4 millones de euros), Audi cubrió la deuda con su propio dinero y esta edición de 2025, que se desarrollará del 4 al 21 de julio, promete ser igualmente interesante. 

Entre las óperas que encargó y produjo, más de cuarenta a lo largo de su carrera, figuran obras tan importantes como La vida con un idiota (1992) de Alfred Schnittke, Inocencia de Kaija Saariaho, Il Viaggio, Dante de Pascal Dusapin, Escribiendo a Vermeer de Andriessen, o Picture a Day Like This de George Benjamin, así como óperas nuevas de Jonathan Harvey, Hans Werner Henze, Tan Dun, o Wolfgang Rihm, además de colaborar en los estrenos mundiales de Tebanos de Julian Anderson, Penthésilée de Pascal Dusapin, Theatre of the World de Louis Andriessen, y Fin de partie (2019) de Kurtág. Además Audi ha convocado a artistas plásticos fundamentales para colaborar en sus producciones como Karel Appel, Georg Baselitz, Anish Kapoor, Jacques Herzog & Pierre de Meuron, Jannis Kounellis, Berlinde De Bruyckere o Jonathan Meese. Como regista, es autor de unas ochenta producciones que se han presentado en los mejores teatros occidentales y abarcan desde la ópera barroca hasta la actualidad, pasando por los grandes clásicos, incluida esa Tosca para la Ópera de París que se sigue programando regularmente. 

Esta es la nota de prensa completa que ha publicado el Festival de Aix-in-Provence (en inglés)

It is with great sadness that the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence team has just learned of the sudden death of Pierre Audi, which occurred on the night of Friday, May 2nd to Saturday, May 3rd May in Beijing. The world of artistic creation has lost an immense artist and institution director, a citizen of the world who lived at the crossroads of Mediterranean and Western cultures. As a stage director, he devoted himself entirely to the works, his productions combining a sense of narrative, purity and embodiment – spanning four centuries of music, but with a particular predilection for the baroque era, the works of Wagner and contemporary opera. 

He was the director of prestigious institutions: The Almeida Theatre, London, from 1979 to 1989, the Dutch National Opera for three decades, from 1988 to 2018, the Holland Festival between 2004 and 2014, and The Park Avenue Armory, New York, since 2015, where he constantly sought to renew the relationship between works, places and audiences, between opera and other artistic disciplines, entertaining a unique culture of listening and loyalty with the great creators and composers of today. 

Such was particularly the case with the Festival d'Aix-enProvence, where he took over as General Director in 2019 and which had grown extremely close to his heart, with memorable productions like Mozart's Requiem and Mahler's Resurrection directed by Romeo Castellucci, Gluck's two Iphigenias and the recreation of Rameau's opera Samson. The works he had commissioned were unanimously acclaimed by audiences and critics alike, and have won top prizes, including Kaija Saariaho's Innocence, Pascal Dusapin's Il Viaggio, Dante and George Benjamin's Picture a Day LikeThis. 

He was a great believer in the future of opera (and music theatre), an art form which he considered best of all capable of overcoming all crises. 

At this time of great sorrow, our warmest and most heartfelt thoughts go out to his wife and children, his family and friends.

Obituario de la Bayerische Staatsoper (en inglés)

On The Death of Pierre Audi, by Dr. Olaf Roth

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.