Pierre Audi, director of the Aix-en-Provence Opera Festival, has died

The Franco-Lebanese director Pierre Audi, director of the Aix-en-Provence Opera Festival, died at the age of 67, the institution and the Ministry of Culture announced on Saturday, May 3.

"It is with immense sadness that the Aix-en-Provence Festival team has just learned of the sudden death of Pierre Audi, which occurred on the night of Friday 2 [to] Saturday 3 May in Beijing. The world of artistic creation has lost an immense artist and director of an institution," the Festival team announced in a press release . "Pierre Audi had [dedicated] his life to artistic creation" and "profoundly renewed the language of opera," wrote the Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, on X.

In 2019, this Beirut native took over as general director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, one of the biggest international opera events, and was reappointed at the end of 2021 for a term running until 2027. In the early 1980s, this great fan of opera outside the walls made a name for himself by founding the Almeida Theatre in a disused building in London, transformed into a place of artistic innovation.

An exceptional artistic journey

"When I first thought of the Almeida Theatre, which opened in 1980, it was as a reaction against a certain type of English theatre," he explained in a 2022 interview published on the Aix Festival website. He then became artistic director of the National Opera in Amsterdam, where he created most of his own productions, working with visual artists such as Georg Baselitz and Anish Kapoor. He remained in this position for nearly thirty years.

In 2015, he headed to New York to become artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory, a multidisciplinary space of nearly 5,000 square meters that hosts installations, such as that of Christian Boltanski in 2010, and monumental productions by Ivo van Hove and Ariane Mnouchkine. "It would have been impossible to show them in a conventional room," he explained in 2022.

He himself had staged the creation of The Arab Apocalypse, by Samir Odeh-Tamimi, at the Aix Festival in 2021, and was due to stage Puccini's Tosca at the Paris Opera at the end of the year.

"He deeply believed in the future of lyric art (and musical theatre), an art form more than any other, according to him, capable of overcoming all crises," add the organisers of the Aix Festival.