108-year-old Pianist Colette Maze to Become Oldest Pianist to Release an Album

The album, which will be released later this year, is titled "108 Years of Piano"

French pianist Colette Maze still practices between four and five hours a day, despite the fact that she has lived through two world wars and countless other historic events.

The 108-year-old is planning to release an album later in 2023 that includes works by Gershwin, Schumann, Piazzolla, and Debussy — to be titled "108 years of piano." The disc will make Maze the oldest pianist ever to record an album.

Maze was born in 1914 in Paris, where she studied at the École Normale de Musique with Alfred Cortot and Nadia Boulanger. Maze is a piece of living history, in that she is the last remaining proponent of the Cortot method — a pre-war approach to technique that focuses on relaxation and flexibility.

She taught for years in the École Normale de Musique and at the Bagneux Conservatory, with students coming from all over the world to hear her explanations of Cortot's method.

"I'm young!" Maze told the French newspaper Le Figaro. "Age, this is a story that does not 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!"

You can hear Colette play and speak to Deutsche Welle about her life below.