Stage Director and Impresario Pierre Audi has Died, Aged 67

The founder of the Almeida Theater, Audi held a long career across Europe and New York

Pierre Raymond Audi, the esteemed founder of the Almeida Theater in London, has passed away while on business in China for meetings related to future productions, announced the Minister of Culture in France, Rachida Dati.

Born in 1957 in Lebanon, Audi was raised in Paris and Beirut, where he started a cinema club at school. While studying at the University of Oxford, he directed a production of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens in 1977. 

During his studies, he also led the purchase and renovation of a dilapidated early-19th-century building in the Islington neighborhood of London that he helped fundraise and transform into the Almeida after seeing its potential as a performance venue, the New York Times reported. 

Through the 1980s, the theater hosted productions that offered early career boosts to now-prominent artists, including Robert Wilson, Robert Lepage, Phelim McDermott, Deborah Warner, and Simon McBurney. Its Almeida International Festival of Contemporary Music also became known as a presenter of new and commissioned operas. 

In 1988, Audi began what would become a 30-year tenure at the Dutch National Opera, where he directed the Netherlands’ first full production of the “Ring” and a cycle of Monteverdi’s operas. For the past decade, he was artistic director of the New York’s Park Avenue Armory.  

In 2022, Audi opened the Stadium de Vitrolles venue for the Aix Festival, where he had been director of the Aix-en-Provence Festival since 2018. 

“The thing about Pierre was, it wasn’t going to be traditional, old-fashioned opera,” reflected the opera administrator Matthew Epstein. “It was the expanding of the repertoire both backward — toward Handel and Monteverdi, which he directed and became famous for — and forward, toward so much contemporary opera.”

“He profoundly renewed the language of opera, through his rigor, his freedom, and his singular vision,” Dati posted on X. “At the head of the Aix Festival and artistic director of the Park Avenue Armory in New York, he continued to multiply bold projects in the service of art. He leaves behind an immense body of work, a living legacy and an indelible mark on the lyric scene.”

Mr. Audi is survived by his wife, children, brother, and sister. Our condolences to his family, friends, and colleagues.