I wouldn’t first like to remember Pierre Audi as a visionary or a leader, despite all the works and collaborations he has brought into being. 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 house; 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.
It is remarkable how many new works he brought to life, thanks to his deep-felt respect towards poets, playwrights, visual artists, and maybe first and foremost composers. Even more remarkable is how many opportunities he has offered to his own colleagues, and how extremely protective he then was of the projects he endorsed. He put his own name on the line for things that were often very far removed from his own aesthetics, that looked and felt very different from his own work. In that, although his directing work was his pride, his legacy is much more multifaceted than most directors’, because of his way of understanding curating as directing and vice versa.
He was a man of power, too, and as such a legitimate target for many forms of criticism. Despite all the caveats that are classical to an artist-manager, when everything’s said and done, we might agree to think that his strong convictions made him one of the better ones.
He could be tough and it is relentlessly intriguing how sensitive he was behind his poised façade, to the point of taking many things personally in his work relationships too. He could easily be rubbed the wrong way, and could just as easily take the matters of others to heart. It came as a surprise to me how important it was to him that we had buried our respective mothers in the same cemetery, a couple hundreds of meters apart.
My thoughts go to Pierre’s family and friends, and of course to the team in Aix that has to open in two months without their artistic leader, who has put so much effort in keeping the ship afloat in these difficult times.
>marginalia* 