http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/arts/music/gerard-mortier-opera-visionary-dies-at-70.html
MusicGerard Mortier,
Opera Visionary,
Dies at 70By ZACHARY WOOLFE
MARCH 9, 2014 
Gerard Mortier in 2011.Gerard Mortier, a visionary opera company leader whose bold theatricality and updatings of the canon helped define the art form’s modern history, died on Saturday at his home in
Brussels. He was 70.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said
Simon Bauwens, Mr. Mortier’s personal assistant at the
Teatro Real in
Madrid. Mr. Mortier was that company’s artistic director from 2009 until last year, when his title was changed to artistic adviser in a tussle with the Spanish government over his successor after he announced in September that he was being treated for cancer.
It was a characteristically feisty situation for a man who relished a battle during a four-decade career at the helm of some of the world’s most important opera companies, including the
Salzburg Festival and the
Paris Opera.
Sometimes the battlegrounds were artistic, as in the furor over his farewell production after 10 years at Salzburg, a 2001
“Die Fledermaus” featuring drugs and Nazi thugs.
Sometimes they were financial, as when the
Theatre de la Monnaie in
Brussels, which he led from 1981 to 1991, went into debt over his lavish renovation of the opera house, complete with a floor by the blue-chip American Minimalist artist
Sol Le Witt.
And sometimes they were related to Mr. Mortier himself, as when he and
New York City Opera parted ways over budget disagreements in 2008, only a year and a half into his tenure.
But these clashes were always expressions of Mr. Mortier’s bracing and intellectually charged vision of opera, and his disdain for the decorous irrelevance often associated with it.
In the summer of 2011, reflecting in an interview on a raucous Madrid production of
Karol Szymanowski's
“King Roger” the previous fall, he said with a smile: “It was an enormous scandal, and it became an enormous success. On opening night, I said, ‘Now we are really international.’ People aren’t sleeping at the end.”
