“It is with immense sadness that the team of the Aix-en-Provence festival has just learned of the brutal death of Pierre Audi, which occurred on Friday 2 to Saturday May 3 in Beijing. The world of artistic creation loses an immense artist and director of institution, ”said the Aix festival in a press release transmitted to AFP. The causes of his death were not revealed.
“Pierre Audi had dedicated his life to artistic creation” and “deeply renewed the language of the opera”, praised the Minister of Culture Rachida Dati on X.
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Artistic director of the National Opera of Amsterdam for thirty years
In 2019, this native of Beirut had taken the general management of the Aix-en-Provence Festival, one of the largest international events in lyric art, and had been renewed at the end of 2021 for a mandate that ran until 2027.
-In the early 1980s, this great follower of the opera outside the walls was known by founding the Almeida Theater in an abandoned building in London, transformed into a place of artistic innovation.
“When I thought the Almeida Theater, opened in 1980, it was in reaction against a certain type of English theater,” he explained in 2022 in an interview published on the Aix Festival website.
He then became artistic director of the National Opera of Amsterdam, where he created most of his staging, working with visual artists like Georg Baselitz or Anish Kapoor. He will remain in this position almost thirty years.
His staging of Puccini “Tosca” planned this year at the Paris Opera
In 2015, he headed for New York by becoming the artistic director of Park Avenue Armory, a multidisciplinary place of almost 5,000 m2 which welcomed facilities (Christian Boltanski in 2010) or monumental staging of Ivo Van Hove or Ariane Mnouchkine.
“It would have been impossible to () show them in a conventional room,” explained Mr. Audi in 2022. He himself had staged the creation of “the Arab Apocalypse” by Samir Odeh Tamimi at the Aix Festival in 2021 and had to mount “TOSCA” from Puccini to the Paris Opera at the end of 2025
“He believed deeply in the future of lyric art (and musical theater), art more than any other capacity, according to him, to overcome all the crises,” said the Aix Festival.
