Louis Erlo, who led the Opéra de Lyon from 1969 and later directed the Aix en Provence Festival, has died at 97.

Opéra de Lyon announced the news in a press release and said, “Louis Erlo has just left the stage at the age of 97. He was the very embodiment of a certain idea of opera, an inventive, demanding and popular theater, in the sense that Jean Vilar, Roger Planchon and Jean Dasté also understood it… Louis Erlo leaves us with one conviction: opera is a living art that reinvents itself through the daring of artists and the encounter with audiences. That conviction continues to animate the house he profoundly transformed.”

Erlo trained in electricity at the Lycée de la Martinière before his uncle, Paul Camerlo, named him fifth stage manager at the Lyon Opera. He went on to become a stage director and staged numerous productions, among them “The Coronation of Poppea,” “The Damnation of Faust,” “Don Giovanni,” “Parsifal,” “La belle Hélène,” Chabrier’s “L’Étoile” and “The Love for Three Oranges.”

He was named director of the Opéra de Lyon in 1969, with the support of municipal officials. The period became known as the “Opéra Nouveau,” marked by new working methods, artistic rigor, openness to all audiences and an emphasis on building a complete theater on the artistic, technical, social and administrative levels. That same year he founded the Ballet de l’Opéra de Lyon with Vittorio Biagi as an autonomous company.

In the early 1980s Erlo invited Jean-Pierre Brossmann to join him as codirector. Together they established the Orchestre de l’Opéra de Lyon and built the house into one of the leading international lyric stages. In under a quarter century, the company produced a catalog of nearly 80 audio and video recordings.

Erlo’s career also included the Opéra Studio de Paris, during the tenure of Rolf Liebermann. He directed the Aix en Provence Festival from 1982 to 1996, where he broadened the repertoire to include baroque music, including a revival of Rameau’s “Les Boréades” under John Eliot Gardiner.