AIX-EN-PROVENCE.- It is with great sadness that the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence team has just learned of the sudden death of Pierre Audi, which occurred on the night of Friday, May 2nd to Saturday, May 3rd May in Beijing. The world of artistic creation has lost an immense artist and institution director, a citizen of the world who lived at the crossroads of Mediterranean and Western cultures. As a stage director, he devoted himself entirely to the works, his productions combining a sense of narrative, purity and embodiment – spanning four centuries of music, but with a particular predilection for the baroque era, the works of Wagner and contemporary opera. He was the director of prestigious institutions: The Almeida Theatre, London, from 1979 to 1989, the Dutch National Opera for three decades, from 1988 to 2018, the Holland Festival between 2004 and 2014, and The Park Avenue Armory, New York, since 2015, where he constantly sought to renew the relationship between works, places and audiences, between opera and other artistic disciplines, entertaining a unique culture of listening and loyalty with the great creators and composers of today. Such was particularly the case with the Festival d'Aix-en- Provence, where he took over as General Director in 2019 and which had grown extremely close to his heart, with memorable productions like Mozart's Requiem and Mahler's Resurrection directed by Romeo Castellucci, Gluck's two Iphigenias and the recreation of Rameau's opera Samson. The works he had commissioned were unanimously acclaimed by audiences and critics alike, and have won top prizes, including Kaija Saariaho's Innocence, Pascal Dusapin's Il Viaggio, Dante and George Benjamin's Picture a Day Like This. He was a great believer in the future of opera (and music theatre), an art form which he considered best of all capable of overcoming all crises. At this time of great sorrow, our warmest and most heartfelt thoughts go out to his wife and children, his family and friends.

BIOGRAPHY OF PIERRE AUDI

Pierre Audi was born in Beirut and studied at Oxford. He founded the Almeida Theatre in London in 1979, as well as its International Festival of Contemporary Music, which he directed until 1989. From 1988 to 2018, he was artistic director of the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam, where he created the majority of his stage productions and worked with visual artists such as Karel Appel, Georg Baselitz, Anish Kapoor and Jonathan Meese. During the same period, he staged a number of contemporary works, such as Feldman’s Neither; Vivier’s Rêves d’un Marco Polo; Stockhausen’s aus LICHT; and the world premieres of works by Rihm, Henze, Tan Dun, Vir, Saariaho, Knaïfel and Trojahn. He staged Venus und Adonis, Tamerlano and Parsifal at the Bavarian State Opera; Die Zauberflöte and Dionysos at the Salzburg Festival; Tamerlano, Alcina and Zoroastre at Drottningholms Slottsteater; La Juive, Tosca and Endgame at the Opéra national de Paris; Rigoletto at the Vienna State Opera; Partenope at the Theater an der Wien; Pelléas et Mélisande, Iphigénie en Aulide, Iphigénie en Tauride, Orlando, Tamerlan and Alcina at the Théâtre de La Monnaie in Brussels; Il matrimonio segreto, Orlando Furioso, Médée and Tristan und Isolde at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées; Pelléas et Mélisande, Tristan und Isolde, Attila and William Tell at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Gisela at the Ruhrtriennale, and La Conquista de México and Bomarzo at the Teatro Real de Madrid. The artist staged the world premiere of Anderson’s Thebans at the English National Opera, Dusapin’s Penthesilea at the Théâtre de La Monnaie in Brussels, Andriessen’s Theatre of the World at the Dutch National Opera in Amsterdam; and Kurtág’s Endgame at La Scala di Milano. For 30 years, he was director of the Dutch National Opera, where he presented the Netherlands’ first production of Wagner’s Ring cycle, as well as many other others: Les Troyens, Parsifal, Lohengrin, Tristan und Isolde, and several works by Schoenberg, Puccini, Mozart, Rossini, the complete operatic works of Monteverdi, and several world premieres. From 2004 to 2014, he was the artistic director of the Holland Festival. In 2018, he took over as general director of the Festival d’Aix-en- Provence. Since 2015, he has been artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York. He has received numerous other awards and honours: the Leslie Boosey Award, a Dutch Theatre Critics Award, a prize from the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, a Silver Medal from the City of Amsterdam, the Medal of Honour (Drottningholm, Sweden), the first Johannes Vermeer Award, and the Gold Medal of Honour for Art and Science of the House of Orange-Nassau. Pierre Audi is Knight of the Order of the Lion of the Netherlands, Chevalier de l'ordre de la Légion d'honneur and Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His recent productions include Odeh-Tamimi’s L'Apocalypse arabe and Il ritorno d'Ulisse in patria at the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, Orphée et Eurydice at the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, Simon Boccanegra at the New National Theatre in Tokyo and at Finnish National Opera, the French version of Macbeth at the Verdi Festival of Teatro Regio in Parma, as well as Siegfried and Götterdämmerung at La Monnaie.