Messages of sorrow and sympathy have poured in overnight for Pierre Audi, director of the Aix-en-Provence festival, who died suddenly at 67.
Het Concertgebouw Amsterdam: It is with great sadness that we learned of the death of Pierre Audi (1957-2025). Pierre Audi has been invaluable for his pioneering contributions to the performing arts in our country. As a member of our Board of Commissioners, we owe him permanent thanks for his loyal dedication and support to the Concert Building and the many musicians for whom he was a great inspiration. We wish his family every strength to bear this tremendous loss.
La Monnaie, Brussels: It is with deep sadness we learned of the passing of Pierre Audi. The renowned director created several memorable productions at La Monnaie, including ‘Alcina’, ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’, ‘Tamerlano’ and, more recently, the final two parts of Wagner’s ‘Ring’ cycle. On behalf of everyone working at La Monnaie, we would like to extend our sincere condolences to his loved ones.
Matthew Shivlock (San Francisco Opera director): Farewell Pierre. It is impossible to believe you are no longer with us. You bridged the void between the impossible and the possible, envisioning what could be and having the courage to make it so. Your artistic courage will continue to be a beautiful inspiration to never accept the status quo and to embrace the new. Thank you for being such a light in this world. I will miss you dearly and send deepest condolences to your family, colleagues and friends.
Fabio Luisi (conductor): A wonderful Renaissance man and a great artist. It was a pleasure to work with him; he had clear ideas, a calm way of working, and was always focused on logic, naturalness, and aesthetics. A true “uomo di teatro”. He will be missed.
Emmanuelle Haim (conductor): Goodbye my dear Pierre Audi and thank you for all those so many moments spent with you in the last 32 years. Thinking of your family and festival teams.
Christophe Rousset (conductor): Pierre Audi has left us: astonishing and heartache.
Aleksi Barrière (son of Kaija Saariaho): To me he was first and foremost a craftsman of modernism. You don’t often hear those words together in a field where a stage director can seemingly only be either a conservative drudge or a flamboyant and provocative innovator. Pierre worked tirelessly, with a deep-seated belief in the power of art and in particular the art of his time, keeping fiercely his own aesthetic line: a stylish visual dialect grounded in strong gestures and colors that took the black box as its canvas. His craftsmanship was so proverbial that he was routinely called in to replace a defecting director in one or the other top opera houses; everyone knew he would come, do his thing, and do it with utter respect for the material. Rather than being resentful for not being the first or second choice, he chose to pride himself on the craftsmanship and expertise that made him ubiquitous. There are ungrateful parts in the work that need to be embraced to be transcended. The ‘advice’ he gave me a long time ago was sobering: “I cannot recommend a career as a stage director. It’s very difficult.”
We never spoke of opera. In inclination and biography, our starting points were similar in that we were originally more occupied with the modern than the classical, with the possibilities of new music theatre rather than the grand lyrical tradition, and fell in love with the potential of the big stage and the operatic form coming from that specific place. Despite becoming a full-blown opera director, he never stopped working with staunch minimalism, and the bold premise that there should be no such thing as business as usual: anything less than a great piece of music, a bright directorial vision, and whenever possible a strong input from a visual artist were ingredients that he considered had to all be procured individually and at the highest level. The fine line between directing and curating was at its thinnest with this man, and the acknowledgment that they form a spectrum has already been a lesson for those who have been following the path of interdisciplinarity as a fundamental guideline; at least it has for me, despite all the disagreements in content.
Audi has also been one of the few directors used to working with big resources who didn’t look down on doing smaller things, created with restricted means, in concert halls for instance, as opportunities to serve a piece, study it, give it a better chance in the ways that a director can, illuminating it with the means of theatre and design. I don’t believe he needed those gigs in any material sense, although his ‘mises en espace’ were also clever products for him to sell in a world with only that many big stages. It’s also that not everything needs to be on the big stage, and the director’s work doesn’t always need to be in focus. Range also is a marker of craftsmanship. Everyone knows he was also adept of the monumental and pharaonic, whenever applicable.
Katia Ledoux (singer): I don’t know how to deal with the info of the very sudden passing of opera titan Pierre Audi. I loved working with him and keep only positive memories of very intense and precise rehearsals with a genius mind. What this man singlehandedly did for the opera world (especially jn the Netherlands) cannot ever be understated.
Nadja Michael (singer) First my very first Tannhäuser Peter Seifert left us and now Pierre Audi- the very man who facilitated my entrance in the soprano field. A full hearted fighter for our art. What a Schock. Still in disbelief.
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