#dutchnationalopera — Public Fediverse posts

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

#DutchNationalOpera #GyörgyLigeti #KarlheinzStockhausen #PierreAudi #TruzeLodder

Mathilde Wantenaar on her new opera A Song for the Moon: ‘With music you can achieve anything’

Mahtilde Wantenaar (c) Karen van Gilst

In 2013 Mathilde Wantenaar (Amsterdam, 1993) participated in the project Boom|Amsterdam is an opera, two years later she wrote the mini-opera Personar for the first edition of the Opera Forward Festival. In March her family opera Een lied voor de maan (A Song for the Moon) was to have its world premiere in that very festival. Like all concerts in the Netherlands the performances were cancelled because of the outbreak of Covid-19. Let’s hope the planned performances in Madrid, Munich and Aix-en-Provence in May and June will proceed. Here’s the interview I conducted in February.

Mathilde Wantenaar’s love for music was instilled by her parents. Her mother teaches singing, her father plays the accordion, piano and bandoneon, and as long as she can remember she was surrounded by music at home. She played the guitar and cello herself, accompanied her mother’s students and sometimes sang along with them. She also composed her own pieces early on. – Something she initially considered to be her ‘own crazy little thing’; the idea of becoming a composer only arose when she took part in a composition project by Asko|Schönberg at secondary school.

Human voice

In 2011 she enrolled for the preparatory course at the Conservatory of Amsterdam, where she subsequently studied composition, with cello, piano and singing as secondary subjects. Already during her studies she won several prizes, among others in the Alba Rosa Viëtor Composition Competition and the Princess Christina Competition. After graduating in 2016 she applied for a follow-up study in singing at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague.

From early childhood Wantenaar has had a great affinity with the human voice. In recent years this has led to a series of successful vocal works for renowned Dutch musicians and ensembles such as the soprano Johannette Zomer, the quintet Wishful Singing, the Netherlands Chamber Choir and the Dutch Radio Choir. It was obvious that one day there would be a sequel to her 20-minute opera Personar with which she concluded her composition studies.

Opera

‘As a child I regularly went to operas with my parents’, says Wantenaar. ‘I secretly dreamed of composing one myself, even though I initially considered my children’s pieces and rumblings at the piano to be a private thing. In that respect I lived completely in my own fantasy world. – Until I started thinking about what I would become when I grew up. When I auditioned for the Conservatory of Amsterdam, I was asked where I saw myself in ten years’ time. I answered I hoped to write an opera for Dutch National Opera. – For the big stage.’ She smiles furtively, as if she were ashamed of her youthful hubris.

That’s why she immediately accepted when Dutch National Opera offered her to take part in the workshop ‘composing for a youthful audience’ of the European Network of Opera Academies. The idea of creating a fairy-tale opera originated in 2017, during a workshop conducted by dramaturge Willem Bruls at La Monnaie in Brussels. ‘We formed a team, in which this idea bubbled up. But the question was what kind of fairy-tale exactly? So we started reading a lot of books and someone from the team tipped A Song for the Moon by Toon Tellegen, which she had read to her children herself.’

Toon Tellegen

‘I’ve known Toon Tellegen’s work for a long time, my parents used to read his stories to me when I was little. I still enjoy them. – Occasionally I read them to my boyfriend before we go to sleep. During a period when I was out of my depth at the conservatory I read the collection Misschien wisten zij alles (Maybe they knew everything) in one go. The stories are at the same time comforting, uplifting, wonderful and above all very beautiful. They lifted me above my grief and made me calm.’

However, she did not yet know A Song for the Moon when it was proposed. ‘When I read it, I was immediately touched. It appealed to me that Tellegen broaches themes like loneliness, identity, disappointment and friendship. I especially like the fact that music plays a central role in it, ideal for an opera. The Mole, the main character, undergoes a true development. In the beginning he is a bit shy and insecure, but in the end he crawls out of his shell thanks to the music, makes friends and goes out into the wide world.’

Cheering up the Moon

Wantenaar wrote the libretto herself, together with Willem Bruls, keeping as close as possible to the original: ‘Toon Tellegen’s language is already very musical and imitable. There are five singers and six instrumentalists and the opera lasts about an hour.’

‘In the first act, the Mole is on stage alone. He is lonely and seeks contact with the Moon, but when he greets it he gets no response. He wonders why. Can’t the Moon talk, doesn’t he want to talk, or doesn’t he know what to say? All those things of course also concern the Mole himself, but he doesn’t want to face his own loneliness. He decides to write a song to cheer up the Moon. This proves not to be easy, but in the end he succeeds and shows it to the Grasshopper, who is a conductor.’

‘Together they form an orchestra in the second act, with singing mice and Frog, the diva-tenor. This act is a somewhat comical counterpart to the quiet and sad first movement. They rehearse the song and perform it for the Moon, but when they look up expectantly afterwards, it looks rather sad. Everyone is deeply disappointed and the Mole crawls back into his little hole defeated. He wonders if the Moon is angry now, and may come down to shine straight in his face.’

The power of music

‘In the third and final act the Mole receives composition lessons from the wise Cricket. He looks at the song and says: “I know! It’s a beautiful song, but gloomy.” He changes a lowered tone (a flat tone is calles “mol” in Dutch) into a sharp one (a raised tone), upon which the song suddenly becomes cheerful. Yet the Mole doesn’t quite dare to believe in it yet. He needs the courage of the Grasshopper to present the new version to the Moon.’

‘This time the Moon does looks happy afterwards, he even glows! For a moment the Mole still has doubts about himself, but then he realizes he is good as he is: “I am the Mole and I remain the Mole. Sometimes I’m gloomy, but sometimes I’m cheerful.” He finds the courage to step up to the Earthworm and make his first real friendship. So everything turns out all right at the end of the opera.’

‘The great thing is that the story is easy for children to follow, but at the same time has so much philosophical depth that it is also interesting for adults. The Cricket sings: “With music you can achieve anything”. To me, that’s the core of this opera.’

More info and playlist here. 

#ASongForTheMoon #DutchNationalOpera #MathildeWantenaar #ToonTellegen #WillemBruls