pierre audi
in conversation with joshua cody

Pierre Audi, the artistic director of the Netherlands Opera, was born in Beirut and was raised there and in Paris. He read history at Oxford, and in 1979 he launched the Almeida Theatre, a innovative and international performing arts center in Islington, London. A director of both plays and operas and a recipient of various awards, he has commissioned numerous operas by living composers, including Wolfgang Rihm, Michael Finnissy, Sylvano Bussotti, and, presently, Louis Andriessen. His personal repertoire at the Netherlands Opera, where he has served as artistic director since 1988, has ranged from Monteverdi to Feldman (Neither), from Mozart to Birtwistle (Punch and Judy). Some of his future projects with the Nederlands Opera include a Schoenberg Trilogy (Die gluckliche Hand, Von heute auf morgen, and Erwartung) and Holland's first complete performance of The Ring.  Joshua Cody, artistic director of the Ensemble Sospeso, spoke to Mr. Audi during the first performances of Rosa, the 1995 collaboration between Dutch composer Louis Andriessen and British librettist and director Peter Greenaway.

The Netherlands Opera is celebrated for its unconventional productions; Rosa is already generating controversy in its first week of performances. Could the production tour?

I think in America, you could do it: at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, maybe.  But what's interesting here—and this wouldn't necessarily be the case somewhere else—is that it's done by an opera company, inside of a complete season; it's not hived off as a piece of avant-garde art stuff. It is an opera, just like Mozart's Figaro, or Johann Strauss's Fledermaus, which are playing on either side of it this season. It is part of our opera's normal program. It belongs to the stream of opera flowing through the veins of an opera company, the duty of which is to talk about the future and commission new works.

Do you have any predictions as far as the opera's reception?

Well, there's a massive dance public here, there's a massive film public here, a massive visual arts public, and we've worked very hard to appeal to all of these audiences. Our audience is not just a typical, old-hat opera crowd; it is a very mixed art public. The tickets are, thankfully, cheap enough, compared to other opera houses, to allow accessibility, particularly to younger audiences. That's why such an opera stands a chance. If it was playing in a house where ticket prices were too high, like most opera houses, it would get a very unfair deal.

This opera uses technical resources to an extent that I've seldom seen, in terms of film, lighting, and movement on stage.

Well, that was the whole challenge of working with Greenaway in the theater. There are a lot of directors working in opera that are doing very virtuosic work but are not filmmakers; Greenaway brings the possibility marrying theatricality and film-making imagery in a musical manner, and with Rosa, that's exactly what you get. Our house is pretty good technically. It has its faults and problems, like all modern buildings. But it's a very good tool, particularly for the sort of production that Greenaway did.

Do different levels of technical sophistication in different opera houses on the international circuit pose a further problem to touring productions and collaborations?

The problem with our house is that it is very wide; the stage is too big, really. That makes it very hard to find compatible opera houses. The only ones that are truly compatible are the English National Opera, the Bastille in Paris, and the new theater in Genoa. I could add the indoor opera house in Bregens, and the big house at the Salzburg Festspiele. These are the only houses that are really possible for collaborations.

When you produce older works—Mozart, or Monteverdi, which you just completed—do you have certain feelings as to the use of modern technology?

In my productions, I tend to use almost no technology. But I enjoy the work of other directors who use it a lot. I like the two extremes, and that's what I try to show with the company: that in spite of the technological wizardry of our theater, the emotional content of opera must at times be expressed without calling upon it. When technology is called upon, then it is used in the most extreme fashion, to create the kind of experience that you have with Rosa; the two extremes interest me.