Loss of an engaging sphinx – Pierre Audi died unexpectedly in Beijing

Pierre Audi, the headstrong opera director who brought Dutch National Opera world fame with his adventurous productions, died on the night of May 2 to 3. He suffered a heart attack in Beijing, where, according to The New York Times, he was ‘for meetings related to future productions’, but was ‘preparing a reprise of one of his productions’, according to Le Figaro. With his demise, Audi leaves a huge void in the international theatre scene.

In the Netherlands, Audi, born in Beirut in 1957, shook up the mothballed Netherlands Opera (later renamed De Nationale Opera) considerably. He was hired in 1988 as a complete unknown director –lacking any experience in opera– by then director Truze Lodder, who had recognized his amazing talents as director of the avant-garde Almeida Theatre he had set up in London in his twenties. Audi grabbed his opportunity and set to work relentlessly.

Earthly elements

Audi at once made a name for himself with his staging of Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria in 1990. He soon developed a completely unique signature, in which empty playing surfaces, fire and other earthly elements play a prominent role. Perhaps best known are his several times repeated productions of Wagner’s integral Der Ring des Nibelungen and the gigantic enterprise Aus Licht in 2019. This production in the Holland Festival presented no less than 15 hours out of the 29 hours of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s opera Licht, die sieben Tage der Woche in the Amsterdam Gashouder.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QI3A0Er5Agw&ab_channel=NationaleOpera%26Ballet

When he left Dutch National Opera in 2018, after 30 years of service, it occupied a prominent place on the theatrical world map. In recent years, Audi was both artistic director of Festival D’Aix en Provence and Park Avenue Armory in New York. Nevertheless, he continued to live in Amsterdam with his wife and two children.

I myself got to know Audi during my study of musicology, when in 1995 I was involved as an intern in his production of the Schoenberg trilogy, with the one-acts Erwartung, Die glückliche Hand and Von heute auf morgen. For Erwartung, he had the stage filled with real trees, forming the forest through which the female protagonist wanders confused.

Amiable

Audi also remained a fixture in my later life as a music journalist. Many times I interviewed him for NPOKlassiek, the Dutch classical radio station, and in 2019 I made a reportage on his spectacular production Aus Licht, which included the controversial Helikopter-Streichquartett.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7JP6kQ8LRYLutrherA653I

Audi was distinctly amiable, and despite his ever busy schedule, he always found time for a talk. Calmly and thoughtfully he formulated his views on the subjects at hand. His brown eyes invariably gazed penetratingly into mine, yet nevertheless he also remained somewhat distant and elusive, like a sphinx. When once I teased him in a column that he invariably spoke English despite his long stay in our country, he presented his next press conference in Dutch.

In 2004 I browsed through his record closet with him, for the magazine of the Asko Ensemble and the Schönberg Ensemble (later merged into Asko|Schönberg and renamed Het Muziek as of season 2025-26). With his somewhat nasal voice and French-tinged Dutch, he declared that he intended to listen to the many CDs still wrapped in cellophane after his retirement. –

Unfortunately, Audi never made it that far. He died in harness, aged 67. I will miss him.

Below our talk on his cd-collection, published in 2005 in the Asko-Schönberg magazine.

Amsterdam, 1 November 2004

THE RECORD COLLECTION OF PIERRE AUDI

When I ring his bell at the appointed time, someone from television opens the door: the recordings for a documentary are running late. I wait in a room furnished with baroque furniture, but otherwise Spartan; there are no carpets, no paintings on the walls. After a while Audi arrives, excuses himself and leads me into an immense study, where he points to an eighteenth-century semainire. Once its seven drawers secured aristocrats’ shirts for each day of the week; now they serve as a record cabinet. Audi invites me to browse through them, while he once again speaks with the camera crew.

Beethoven alongside Ligeti

Like a thief in the night, I open drawer after drawer. Each of these turns out to be crammed with two rows of CDs, in which the complete string quartets of Beethoven and Haydn are egalitarian juxtaposed with such incendiary operas as Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre and Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy. The integral symphonies of Bruckner and Sibelius are flanked by recordings of Louis Andriessen, Claude Vivier, Giacinto Scelsi and Mauricio Kagel; compilation boxes of Callas, Furtwängler and Celibidache are sandwiched between albums of Philip Glass, Arvo Pärt and Charles Ives.

Just when I wonder how Audi manages to find a CD of his liking in this chaos, he enters: ‘No problem, because I rarely listen to music.’ – Not even to the operas he stages? ‘I do, but then it only concerns fragments, which I analyse.’ Suddenly fierce: ‘A recording is not the ultimate statement about how an opera should sound, as some critics believe. They come with the sound of a particular CD in their ears, and if the production deviates from that, they don’t like the singers, or the conductor, or both. That shows mental laziness: a recording only gives an impression of the vision of a certain group of people at a certain time under a certain conductor.’

Wrapped CDs

At least a third of his CDs are still  wrapped in cellophane. Why does he buy so many if he doesn’t listen to them anyway? ‘That’s for when I retire, I’m afraid they will no longer be available then. They form a time document: they represent a need I felt at certain times in my life; that way I can relive this later.’ But when I ask him what his first purchase was, he replies, puzzled: ‘I don’t remember…’

We go to a side room filled from floor to ceiling with books and LPs. He stares at the records and says, ‘It started with film music. I wanted to be a film director and from the age of ten I collected everything I could find in that field.’

Among the soundtracks of films by Fellini, Pasolini, French and American filmmakers, there are also some LPs with music by Scelsi, Handel and Bach. ‘Around age 16, I also became interested in modern and classical music.’ Rock music and jazz are missing. ‘Don’t ask me why, but that never interested me…’

No opera!

What music will he listen to first after retirement? ‘Definitely not opera, the human voice forces one to think, because of the text. Also no Mahler, because his music is so theatrical, it is too close to the voice… Bach, but especially modern composers, I want to really immerse myself in their pieces.’

‘In addition, I long for a more meditative form of listening, for music with which I feel synergy. For instance that of Russian composers, their work is evocative and spiritual.’ Does he mean composers such as Pärt and Gubaidulina? ‘No, I’m thinking of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, the classics.’

With a longing smile, ‘Maybe I’ll start listening even before my retirement, when I finally have a home in the country…’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu0uDOPAgFc&ab_channel=NationaleOpera%26Ballet