French pianist ends career with a splash

Agence France-Presse - 28 July 2003

A French concert pianist ended his career Friday by hiring a helicopter
to drop a worn-out piano into a lake in the south of the country. 

François-René Duchable played Beethoven's Third piano concerto and
Saint-Saëns' Second to an audience of 2,000 before the instrument was
consigned to the depths of the lake of la Colmiane near Nice in
southeast France. 

He said he was retiring at the age of 51 to "change his life", far from
tours with a perpetual eye on the time. The gesture, he said, was to
show that everything was over, to get rid of the weight of a career. 

"It was a purification by water," he said. 

Purification by fire follows on August 31 at the Provençal village of
Mazauges. Duchable will play at a festival whose organizers have been
"friends since 1984" and will end the evening by burning the clothes he
performed in. 

"I leave with a real exaltation, a great freedom for what will follow,"
he declared as he prepared to bury the stage-life once and for all. 

Duchable sees himself as a "man of nature" and never liked his life as a
concert pianist, or the world of music, let alone the public that came
to hear him. 

"How could I like one percent of the public since we know that 99
percent of people have no access to classical music? I cannot feel love
for a public that despises others. People think being a musician
reflects a passion. It doesn't. My profession has never brought me
happiness," he said. 

"My love of music has never been in question. I reject money, the
tinsel, this rigid, dusty world, a whole system in which I have never
been at home." 

Duchable said from now on he wants to "live a more personal, tranquil
existence, rediscover calm and solitude," to divide his time between his
beloved sport of cycling, pottery, about which he knows little or
nothing, and perhaps learning other musical instruments. 

"I want to do much more interesting things than keep on doing for 30
years what I have been doing for the last 30." 

"I have held on for 35 years," he said, recalling his first concert
given when he was 16. 

If he does return to the keyboard, it will be in circumstances of his
own choosing and at his own rhythm, in hospitals, schools, prisons and
asylums. 

The pianist said he might also cooperate with actors and sound and light
artists to offer another approach to classical music and plans to
conduct master classes in Switzerland and Paris.