Lecture - Agnès's "Engaged Conversations" Series Welcomes Claire-Marie Le Guay

Her everyday life is that of a wife, mother, daughter, sister, and Parisian who visits museums with her three children (two boys and a girl aged 24, 21, and 15!), strolls through her neighborhood, New Athens, where she encounters her cherished “ghosts”—Chopin, Liszt, Berlioz, Nadia Boulanger—and her living counterparts, such as the composer Pascal Dusapin, delighting in living in a neighborhood rich in culture, both past and present… Her sacred life is her life as a pianist—her fifty concerts a year, her festivals, her moments of absence—“an artist is always absent even when present”—her moments of elevation and transcendence when she reunites with the one who has shared her life for 48 years: her piano.

A deep, intimate connection that began at age 4, intensified at age 10 with three hours of piano practice a day, and was cemented at age 14 with a remarkable admission to the Paris Conservatory, followed by the start of her professional career at age 15! A professional career, an artistic life, a sacred life crowned with success—she has won numerous competitions and several Victoires de la Musique awards, working with the greatest names, including the legendary conductor Daniel Barenboim, as well as the man she calls “the Man of Music,” the brilliant Thierry Escaich.

While music came into her life as a calling, writing had always been there, lying in wait, and it took a meeting with a publisher for her first book, *La vie est plus belle en musique* (Flammarion), to come to fruition, followed by a second (with another publisher), *C’est la nuit qu’il est beau de croire à la lumière* (Albin Michel), and finally a third: *Que la joie demeure*, born from her encounter with Erik Orsenna during a tribute program to Bernard Pivot in 2021.