By 
Colette Maze has been playing the piano for over a century and has thousands of followers on social media.
The French pianist, who was born in June 1914, before the outbreak of World War I and while one of her favorite composers, Claude Debussy, was still alive, practices four hours a day and is about to release her seventh album, “108 Years of Piano.”
Maze moves cautiously between the three pianos in her living room in her Paris flat overlooking the Seine River, but with youthful enthusiasm.
“Me? “I’m young,” she says, smiling.
“I’m not interested in getting older. There are people who are eternally young and amazed by everything, and then there are people who don’t care about anything and have never loved anything, including their man – can you imagine?” She continues.
‘Piano is my life,’ he says.
Maze was a piano teacher for most of her life, and it wasn’t until she turned 100 that she began building a significant fan base – via her Facebook page.
Many people are inspired by her continued good health and refusal to give up traditional French pleasures such as wine, cheese, and chocolate.
“She gives people strength, which is why she has such crazy success,” her son, journalist Fabrice Maze, said, adding with pride that she is one of the few people over the age of 100 who releases albums.
She recalls the sound of “Big Bertha,” the massive cannon used by the German army during World War I, but her main memory is of her instrument. “When I was a kid, I had asthma, and my mother would play violin with my piano teacher to calm me down,” she says.
“Piano, my friend, is my life.” “I need to feel and hear it,” she adds, before performing Debussy’s “Reflections in the Water.”
Maze began playing at the age of five, and despite her parents’ reservations, she was accepted into the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris, where she studied with teachers such as the renowned Alfred Cortot.
Cortot was known for a method of relaxing all of the body’s muscles, which Maze credits with keeping her arthritis at bay.
Her other youthful secret? “I used to do a lot of dancing,” she explains. “I need to feel my muscles, abs, thighs, and arms.” “Everything must be alive.”
