The “Zidane of the piano” has passed away: the young Marseille prodigy Mourad died at the age of 19

The “Zidane of the piano” cut down in his prime. Mourad Tsimpou, a young piano prodigy known by the stage name Mourad, died this Saturday at the age of 19 after a long illness, one of his managers announced to AFP. He died Saturday morning at the Necker children’s hospital in Paris, from a rare liver disease from which he had suffered since childhood, explained Salim Lebghil, one of the two directors of 1392 Records.

Mourad’s musical story began during yet another visit to the Marseille hospital of La Timone, in 2018. Originally, like Zinédine Zidane, from the city of La Castellane in the northern districts of Marseille, which later earned him the nickname “Zidane of the piano”, he discovered the instrument there, which he had never played in his life.

But above all, it is a video that will shake up his destiny. The day before one of his consultations, he listened to an impromptu Chopin on the Internet and reproduced it by improvising on the hospital piano the next day. The scene is captured by another patient, stunned by the teenager’s level of mastery. “I didn’t know how to do symphonies, I just learned the piano 24 hours ago, never taken music lessons before,” he told the media Origines last March. The video was posted on social networks, sparking incredible enthusiasm, which then marked the start of a lightning career.

Two albums at just 19 years old

“Afterwards, it went by so quickly,” he also confided in 2020 in an interview for the online media Brut. He was quickly spotted, made the rounds of television and radio sets and received a piano thanks to a wave of solidarity on social networks. In just a few years, the young man released two albums, and a third was in preparation.

Mourad collaborated with André Manoukian, the rap star Soprano and for example performed during the Top 14 rugby final in 2021 playing La Marseillaise, or even at the Vélodrome in Marseille during an OM match, at Only 15 years old. On his social networks, the videos have tens of thousands of views.

The teenager had “perfect pitch, he played without sheet music,” according to his manager Salim Lebghil. “I don’t consider myself to have perfect pitch, but perhaps relative. I may have an ease in learning a piece,” the musician, full of humility, estimated in an interview with the online media Réel last April.

“There is no barrier”

A fan of the pianists Sofiane Pamart and Ludovico Einaudi, this Marseillais from a family of eight children also confided a few years ago to dreaming of playing with the American singer Alicia Keys. He regularly called on young people in his neighborhood to follow their dreams and not self-censor their ambitions.

“My goal would be for all young people to say to themselves: look he plays the piano, there is no barrier. (…) You can just as easily find your place, like the others,” he encouraged in this recent interview for Réel, confiding in passing that music allowed him to “externalize” the “mental violence” of the northern neighborhoods.

A destiny of a prodigy tragically struck by illness, suddenly. At the beginning of June, he played again during the Art Explora Festival in Marseille. But his state of health caught up with him: in the show “Vide Ton Sac”, the young man explained that he suffered from an “OTC deficiency”, saying that he “didn’t accumulate a lot of protein”.

Mourad will be buried in the Comoros, where his family is from. A Leetchi kitty has been opened “to help and support the family in this difficult ordeal that life can throw at us.”