French pianist Colette Maze, a broadcaster’s favorite since she was 100, died at her Paris home on Sunday at the age of 109, we learned from her family on Tuesday.
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The religious ceremony will take place on Tuesday, November 28, at 10:30 a.m. at the Saint-Roch church in Paris, the same source said.
Her latest album, “109 Years of Piano,” on which she played Gershwin, Piazzolla, Schumann and Debussy, has been available on music platforms since July.
Born a month before the start of World War I and almost four years before the death of one of her favorite composers, Claude Debussy, the pianist was still playing the piano four hours a day when AFP met her in the spring.
“I am young,” she cried at the time. “Old people are stories that don’t exist. (…) There are people who are eternally young and are amazed at everything, and then there are people who are jaded by everything and who have never loved anything, not even their boyfriend, when that happens!”
The daughter of a middle-class Parisian family, she began playing the piano at the age of five, but her parents were against her wanting to become a professional pianist. However, at the age of 15, she managed to enter the École Normale de Musique in Paris, where she took lessons from the famous Alfred Cortot and Nadia Boulanger.
The one who taught for decades at the Normal School of Music and at the Conservatory of Bagneux (Hauts-de-Seine) was also the guardian of the Cortot method, based on exercises to relax and soften all the muscles.