Gerard Mortier, a visionary and often controversial head of a number of major European opera houses and festivals has died; he was 70. He started his career at the Flanders Festival and soon went to work with the conductor Christoph von Dohnányi at Frankfurt Opera, at the time an important centre for cutting-edge opera productions; he later followed Dohnányi to Hamburg Opera. He moved to the Paris Opera where he worked as assistant to Rolf Liebermann who was revitalising the repertoire, mounting many 20th-century works and establishing director-led productions. 

In 1981, Mortier gained his first major post, at the helm of Brussels's Théâtre de la Monnaie. At the time, a staid and rather conservative house, Mortier put on ground-breaking productions of Janáček, John Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer and critically acclaimed productions of Verdi's Don Carlo and Wagner's Ring (directed by Herbert Wernicke).

After Herbert von Karajan's death in 1989, Mortier succeeded him as director of the Salzburg Festival and continued his mission to show that opera was a living, rather than a museum, art-form. As well as striking productions of Mozart, Mortier put on Ligeti's Le grand macabre, Messiaen's St François d'Assise and Kaija Saariaho's L'amour de loin (which he commissioned). He left Salzburg in 2001, as Austria's politics lurched to the right, and became involved in the creation of the RuhrTriennale festival. 

In 2004, he took over as head of the Paris Opera and continued to expand the repertoire and raise eyebrows with his choice of directors. Bill Viola's visually-striking Tristan ind Isolde was a major milestone of Mortier's Paris period. In 2007, he took the post of general manager and artistic director of New York's City Opera where he planned to revitalise the company with courageous planning but when handed a budget that was half what he'd been offered he resigned before any of his plans bore fruit. On the day he resigned he received advances from Madrid's Teatro Real and joined the company as artistic head (a role he reliqnuished last autumn due to ill health). Once more, modern opera took centre stage and this January, even though in greatly weakened health due to the pancreatic cancer that carried him off, he saw the premiere of Charles Wuorinen's Brokeback Mountain, a work he'd originally planned for New York and which he took with him to Spain, attracting international attention.