The Franco-Lebanese director Pierre Audi, who was at the head of the Aix-en-Provence Lyric Art Festival since 2019, died at the age of 67.
Franco-Lebanese director Pierre Audi, boss of the Aix-en-Provence Lyric Art Festival and an ex-artistic director of the Netherlands National Opera, died at the age of 67, AFP learned this Saturday, May 3 from the institution and the Ministry of Culture.
“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 in the night of Friday 2 to Saturday May 3 in Beijing. The world of artistic creation loses a huge artist and director of institution,” said the Aix festival in a press release transmitted to AFP.
“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.
Several political figures from Bouches-du-Rhône also spoke to pay tribute to Pierre Audi, such as the president of the Aix-Marseille Martine Vassal Metropolis or the President of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region Renaud Muselier.
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.
-“He believed deeply in the future of lyric art”
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.
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 Pierre Audi in 2022. Herself staged the creation of “the Arab Apocalypse” from Samir Odeh-Tamimi to the Aix Festival in 2021 and was to mount “Toscini” from Puccini to the Paris Opera in 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 crises,” said the Aix Festival.
