Gerard Mortier, 1943–2014

last updated 8 January 2015

Gerard Mortier’s mission was to kick opera out of its conformist stupor. In a clash-filled career spanning four decades, the avant-garde artistic director never shied from a fight with opera’s stuffy elite, embracing any opportunity to shock them through increasingly edgy and risk-filled productions at some of the world’s most prestigious companies. In 2011, Mortier reflected with pride on one such production, a particularly raucous interpretation of Karol Szymanowski’s King Roger in Madrid. “It was an enormous scandal, and it became an enormous success,” he said, with a smile. “On opening night, I said, ‘Now we are really international. People aren’t sleeping at the end.’”

The Belgian opera impresario “acquired his taste for controversy” at a Jesuit boarding school, said The New York Times. He and his classmates were forced to read iconoclastic writers like Marx, Nietzsche, and Sartre, and Mortier and his opera-loving friends would loudly jeer operatic productions they deemed to be overly conservative. By 1981, Mortier had secured his first major appointment, at the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels, where he quickly attracted attention by staging John Adams’s The Death of Klinghoffer, a controversial opera about terrorists murdering a handicapped American Jew on board a hijacked cruise ship. Mortier would create a similar storm as the head of the prestigious Salzburg Festival in Austria from 1990 to 2001, “and as general director of the Opéra National de Paris from 2004 to 2009,” said the Los Angeles Times.

“The plan was to crown his career at the New York City Opera,” said Variety.com. But when Mortier was presented with a $36 million budget, half of what he had agreed to, he fled to the Teatro Real in Madrid. There he continued to “push the artistic envelope,” staging the operatic premiere of Brokeback Mountain, Annie Proulx’s story about two gay cowboys. He defended his provocative stance to the end, regularly repeating a favorite mantra of his: “If controversy creates tension, tension creates friction, and friction creates warmth. And warmth is what I’m looking for.”