Pierre Audi obituary

The Guardian

06-05-2025

Based successively in London, the Netherlands and France, Pierre Audi, who has died suddenly aged 67, was over a period of 45 years the indefatigable procreator of a sizeable body of innovative work, largely centred around the operatic stage.
As founder of the Almeida theatre in Islington, London, artistic director of the Dutch National Opera (formerly Netherlands Opera) and latterly of the Aix-en-Provence festival, he relished the charting of unknown territory, passionately believing that art forms, not least that of opera, need to be constantly renovated and challenged.
Having acquired the derelict 19th-century building – formally owned by the Salvation Army, and later a toy factory – in Almeida Street, off Upper Street, Audi spearheaded a public campaign to reopen it as a theatre, running it as both a producing company and a receiving house from its opening in 1980 until Ian McDiarmid and Jonathan Kent took over as artistic directors in 1990.
Under Audi's stewardship it rapidly established itself as a hotbed of avant-garde activity. The Almeida International Festival of Contemporary Music and Performance, held at the theatre and at other local venues, offered the works of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Elliott Carter, Morton Feldman, Michael Finnissy, Lukas Foss and other modernists, performed by artists including Astor Piazzolla, Yvar Mikhashoff and the London Sinfonietta.
Spoken theatre, often of a physical nature, was provided by touring companies such as Complicité and Cheek by Jowl, while Peter Brook's Bouffes du Nord company (an inspiration for Audi's project) appeared in 1982. The international dimension was crucial for Audi. Several new operas were commissioned and/or performed there, among them John Casken's Golem, directed by Audi and premiered in 1989, and the festival successfully demonstrated that there was a market for contemporary music and theatre.
Audi was barely 30 when he was headhunted by Netherlands Opera in 1988. He had never set foot in the Netherlands and had never directed opera on a large stage. Facing down objections from members of the Dutch cultural establishment, the Netherlands Opera board placed their faith in his reputation for artistic originality and a cosmopolitan perspective, together with the ability to realise such a programme on a relatively modest budget.
There he continued to espouse contemporary music, commissioning Alfred Schnittke's Life With an Idiot (1992) and works from Dutch composers such as Louis Andriessen, Michel van der Aa, Guus Janssen and others. The overall programme, however, was broad and eclectic, from Gluck, Mozart and Wagner (he staged the first production of the Ring in the Netherlands) to Schoenberg and Messiaen. Some of the world's leading directors, including Harry Kupfer, Peter Sellars, Peter Stein and Stefan Herheim, were lured to Amsterdam by Audi.
In September 2018 he took over the direction of the Aix-en-Provence festival, continuing to foster the principle of a 'dialogue between the arts', combining music, the visual arts and video, with musical theatre and non-theatrical events all part of the mix. Despite the ravages of Covid in 2020, the festival managed to mount the premiere of Kaija Saariaho's opera Innocence, about the psychological aftermath of a school shooting, the following year. Roland Wood (Oedipus) and Susan Bickley (Jocasta) in Thebans, 2014, by Julian Anderson and Frank McGuinness at the London Coliseum. The English National Opera production was directed by Pierre Audi. Photograph: Tristram Kenton/The Guardian
Other significant stagings followed, including, in 2023, George Benjamin's Picture a Day Like This (a co-production with Covent Garden and other houses), Philip Venables/Ted Huffman's The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions (a co-production with the Manchester international festival and others) and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera directed by Thomas Ostermeier in collaboration with the Comédie-Française.
Pledging to extend the reach of the festival geographically, Audi enabled the director Romeo Castellucci to stage Mahler's Resurrection Symphony as an 'exhumation of a mass grave' in the newly reopened Stadium de Vitrolles – a graffiti-daubed, black concrete box on the outskirts of Marseilles. He also initiated a June festival with free entry, as 'a gift to the city', featuring an open-air concert attracting 5,000 people on the Cours Mirabeau in Aix.
Born in Beirut to a Lebanese banker, Raymond Audi, and Andrée Michel Fattal, he went to school in Paris after his family moved to France and then took a degree in Oriental studies at Exeter College, Oxford; he was still only 22 when he founded the Almeida theatre. Losing no time in establishing his credentials as an imaginative, risk-taking impresario, he seized the opportunity to gravitate further towards his first love, opera, in Amsterdam.
At Netherlands Opera he enjoyed a fruitful power-sharing arrangement with the administrative director, Truze Lodder, who established a tough financial discipline for the company. Despite its gleaming new home in the Muziektheater, the company was, when Audi took over, labouring under a huge deficit and a crisis of credibility, being described as a 'shambles' by critics.
Over the course of his remarkably long career with the company (he remained there for 30 years), Audi, along with Lodder, raised its status to an exemplary level, his defiantly progressive tendencies and hunger for innovation earning him respect and support from the public.
There too he was able to develop his own career as an opera director, both in Amsterdam and worldwide. His visual aesthetic tended towards the spare and the abstract. In his Ring with the designer George Tsypin (1999), traditional props were frequently abandoned, replaced by symbolic elements, such as chains dangling from the ceiling in the first scene of Das Rheingold, foreshadowing the slavery that capitalistic acquisition brings in its wake.
The already broad stage of the Musiektheater was extended, sweeping round to encircle the orchestra, which became part of the set, reaching right down into the audience space. Some seats were closely adjacent to the action; other audience members sat in 'adventure seats', suspended on gantries high above the stage, the aim being to draw in spectators, in the manner of Greek drama.
The incipient brutalism of his austere style reached its nadir in the provocative, grotesquely sexualised Flower Maidens' costumes in the 2018 Munich Parsifal, designed by Georg Baselitz. But Audi was also capable of spectacular effects, as in his production of Monteverdi's Orfeo (1997), with the waters of the Styx bursting into flames as Orfeo crosses it: a stunning evocation of Pluto's infernal kingdom.
Concurrently with the post at Netherlands Opera, Audi held the artistic directorship of the Holland festival (2004–14), where works in multiple genres were presented in conjunction with such artists as William Kentridge, Tacita Dean and Ryoji Ikeda, and by directors including Sam Mendes and Ivo Van Hove. In 2014 he directed the world premiere of Julian Anderson's Thebans (with a libretto by Frank McGuinness) at English National Opera.
He also founded the interdisciplinary Opera Forward festival in 2015, in the same year taking over the artistic direction of the Park Avenue Armory in New York, where he commissioned work across various art forms.
He is survived by his wife, Marieke Peters, and his children, Alexander and Sophia, his brother, Paul, and sister, Sherine.
Pierre Audi, impresario and opera director, born 9 November 1957; died 3 May 2025