Biography

Pierre Audi was born in 1957 in Beirut, Lebanon. He grew up in Beirut and Paris. Between 1975 and 1978, he studied history at Oxford University in the UK. In 1979, he founded the Almeida Theatre in London, as well as the Festival of Contemporary Music, which he led until 1989. Since 1988, he has been the artistic director of the Netherlands Opera.

Many of Audi’s acclaimed productions created for the Netherlands Opera have travelled to other stages, such as his cycle of the four Monteverdi operas. These were also performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, at the Sydney Festival, and at the Los Angeles Opera. He staged the first Dutch production of Wagner’s Ring cycle, as well as many other operas from the entire repertoire, including works by Mozart, Gluck, Berlioz, Rameau, Handel and Puccini. He has also directed contemporary music theatre, including Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy, Morton Feldman’s Neither, and Claude Vivier’s Rêves d’un Marco Polo. He has staged the world premières of pieces by Theo Loevendie, Guus Janssen, Jonathan Harvey, Hans Werner Henze, Tan Dun, Param Vir, Kaija Saariaho and Alexander Knaifel.

As a guest director, he has worked for the Bavarian State Opera (Venus und Adonis), the Swedish Drottningholm Hofopera (Tamerlano, Alcina and Zoroastre), the Salzburg Festival (2006 revival of the Netherlands Opera production of Die Zauberflöte), the Paris Opera (La Juive), and the Théâtre des Champs-Elysees (Il Matrimonio Segreto), among others. He also directed theatre at Toneelgroep Amsterdam and Het Zuidelijk Toneel.

Among his numerous awards are the Dutch Theatre Critics’ Prize, the Theatre Prize of the Prince Bernhard Culture Fund, and (in 2009) the state prize for the arts, the Johannes Vermeer Award. He is a member of the Orde van de Nederlandse Leeuw and a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur. Besides his work at the Netherlands Opera, in 2004 he was appointed artistic director of the Holland Festival.