One had to experience him: his enthusiasm, his empathy, his eloquence, broad education, and courteous demeanor. The description with which Gerard Mortier characterized Giuseppe Verdi on the anniversary in October 2013 also applied to him. Verdi has been, alongside Mozart and Olivier Messiaen, his preferred composer – and human being.
Without this impresario, art-enabler, and visionary, the Ruhrtriennale would not exist as it does. After ten years in Salzburg, Mortier was clear that it must be an anti-representation festival, especially in the former region, which also aligned with the mentality of the Flemish. The shadow of the Krupp Villa hills fell on the first festival year of his directorship when he invited Johan Simons and his Hollandia troupe with Visconti's "The Fall of the Gods." Mortier's commitment to the arts cannot be conceived without the political aspect. However, it had to be legitimated aesthetically. Explosive material, yes; propaganda, no, that was not his affair.
Since making the Théâtre de la Monnaie in Brussels a premier address, Mortier has sought and challenged the rebellious, resistant nature of art. As discreet and distinguished as he appeared, in the conservative blue suit of the French maître, with precisely parted hair, the baker's son from Ghent, a Jesuit pupil and a doctorate in law, was no comfortably bourgeois spirit.
He was a Citoyen. Mortier, as director in Salzburg, Paris, and Madrid, regarded as the first addresses of national culture, never thought in terms of prestige and state art, but used them for his ideas. The programming of the Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, the Stein stage, and Ariane Mnouchkine stimulated his directorships since the laboratory of the Monnaie Opera in Brussels, which he took over at the age of 38. Patrice Chéreau and Klaus-Michael Grüber were close to him in their lateral thinking. Peter Sellars and Alain Platel brought materials and pieces into the restricted districts of the social for him; in Michael Haneke's "Don Giovanni," the purgatory of vanity burned in a corporate tower. Mortier, the idealist and utopian, the aesthetic revolutionary, always dared the passo estremo, as it is called in "Don Giovanni."
For the Ruhrtriennale, he developed the so-called creations as a genre-crossing concept. And he drew the line of transcendence for the festival – the blue sky over the region was not just a meteorological and ecological matter, but also a spiritual one. Thus not Wagner, but Olivier Messiaen or the blue of Bill Viola and the joyful message of "Saint Francois d'Assise" under the color dome of artist Ilya Kabakov in the Jahrhunderthalle. No fear of angels, of a spiritual invasion and the rediscovery of heaven. Kabakov called Mortier the "spiritual successor of Sergei Diaghilev."
His core idea aimed to overcome the material and class struggle that was embedded in the industrial landmarks themselves. However, he recognized the Promethean: as a principle to ignite the fire of enlightenment. He also resisted the romanticization of the industrial era for cultural purposes: he regarded the halls as lieux de mémoire, as he said.
Tireless, mobile, and highly motivated, Mortier did not shy away from promoting the Ruhrtriennale in small events of the fragmented Ruhr area and inspiringly presenting his project. He did not avoid conflict; he nurtured enmities, he grew from them, it mobilized his resistances. Nothing he hated more than bourgeois narrow-mindedness, the misuse of art for events, and the degradation of the economic and political class. In his polished graciousness lay irony, his charm could have a bite.
Gerard Mortier passed away at the age of 70 on March 9, 2014, in Brussels. His commitment to the arts and a "drama of passion," as his book published in the year of his death is called, will continue to have an impact in Europe into the future.
