Pianist Colette Maze dies at the age of 109

The French pianist Colette Maze, a darling of the networks since she was 100, died on Sunday at her Parisian home at the age of 109, we learned on Tuesday, November 21, from her family. 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, was available on music platforms since July.

Born a month before the start of the First World War 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 at spring.

“I’m young,” she exclaimed at the time. “Age is stories that don’t exist. (...) There are people who are eternally young, amazed by everything, and then people who are jaded by everything and who have never loved anything, not even their boyfriend, if that happens!”

Born into a bourgeois family in Paris, she started playing the piano at age 5 but her parents were opposed to her becoming a professional pianist. However, at the age of 15, she managed to join 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 Bagneux Conservatory (Hauts-de-Seine) was also the custodian of the Cortot method, based on exercises to relax and soften all the muscles. .