–A Pianist Who Started Recording in Her 80s, Dies at 109

— Born before the outbreak of World War I, she began making albums in the 1990s. She released her latest, “109 Ans de Piano,” this year.

“Colette Maze, who has died aged 109, began her recording career at the age of 90 after a lifetime spent teaching the piano; she made a speciality of Debussy’s music, pointing out that during her childhood in First World War Paris she lived near the Impressionist composer. “We could have seen each other,” she speculated.

As a student of Alfred Cortot (1877-1962), Colette Maze valued and passed on the French pianist’s poetic insights, describing how his technique focused on relaxation and flexibility. “Playing the piano has a physical quality. You’re touching it, caressing it,” she told Deutsche Welle, demonstrating the difference between hammering the keys and gently caressing them with her fingertips.

A petite, birdlike figure, she brought to the keyboard a rare tenderness and beauty, born of a century’s experience. While she never had a career in the concert hall, her private recitals in recent years were a remarkable connection to a fast-vanishing period of inter-war musical elegance.”

“I love these climates where you have to create an atmosphere, a daydream,” Colette Maze, as she later became known, said in a 2021 interview with the website Pianote. “I’m connected with Debussy because he corresponds to my deepest sensibility.”

Mrs. Maze would go on to become an accomplished pianist and teacher. But it was only in the late 1990s, when she was over 80, that her son persuaded her to begin recording commercially.

What followed was one of the most surprising second acts in classical music history: seven albums, largely but not exclusively the music of Debussy, and a fan base drawn as much to Mrs. Maze’s exquisite finger work as to her sheer, irrepressible joy, which shone through in interviews with French television and in videos posted to her Facebook page.

“As soon as I get up, I start playing the piano to connect with the forces of life,” she told Pianote. “It’s a habit. It’s always been that way. I don’t need to motivate myself, it’s natural. It’s like an automatic function.”

Mrs. Maze, who was widely considered the world’s oldest recording pianist, died on Nov. 19 in the same Paris apartment where she had lived since she was 18, with views of the Eiffel Tower and the Seine River. She was 109.