Pierre Audi Dies at 67

Pierre Audi, innovative stage director and international impresario, died on May 2 while in Beijing discussing future productions. Born in Beirut in 1957 and raised there and in Paris, Audi studied at the University of Oxford. He first came to the public’s attention when he oversaw the purchase and renovation of an old London lecture hall and its 1980 opening as the Almeida Theater, which quickly became a locus for experimental theater and music.

Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage, Phelim McDermott, Deborah Warner, and Simon McBurney are among the now-prominent artists whose careers received an early boost at the Almeida, which both presented and commissioner new work. In 1988, at age 31, Audi began a three-decade-long stint as the leader of the Dutch National Opera. The company established a reputation for its commissions and progressive stagings, sometimes collaborating with visual artists such as Anish Kapoor and Georg Baselitz. During his tenure Audi directed the Netherlands’ first full production of Wagner’s Ring and a cycle of Monteverdi’s operas.

Throughout his tenure in Holland, Audi also directed in theaters around the world, including his 2010 Metropolitan Opera debut with Verdi’s Attila, a collaboration with the fashion designer Miuccia Prada and the architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron. In 2015 he became artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York, where he presented work by longtime collaborators like William Kentridge and Peter Sellars.

Three years later he left the Dutch National Opera to become director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival. There, in 2022, he opened another new-old venue, the Stadium de Vitrolles, a long-abandoned graffiti-strewn black concrete box dating from the 1990s, which launched with Resurrection, a staging of Mahler’s Second Symphony as a 90-minute exhumation of a shallow mass grave. Shortly after this production, he said what could serve as his epitaph: “The important thing is not to imitate what we did this year.

The New York Times