He wuz robbed!

Lucas Debargue, a 24-year-old French pianist, came fourth in the finale of the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow on 30 June, yet he’s the only competitor anyone is talking about. Why?

The main reason is that they’re riveted by his backstory. Have you noticed how we all say ‘backstory’ these days, instead of boring old ‘background’? It’s defined as ‘the things that have happened to someone before you first see or read about that person in a film or story’. Neal Gabler wrote a book called Life: The Movie, about our entertainment-obsessed society’s urge to stretch and squash everything from terrorist attacks to an argument at the checkout into an imaginary plot. That doesn’t reflect well on us, but in the case of Lucas Debargue the urge is irresistible. His backstory belongs in a French film that would have music buffs complaining that this sort of thing never happens in real life.

Incredibly, he was self-taught until well into his teens, beginning with jazz. To quote my colleague Ismene Brown, in a Spectator blog post shared 3,700 times on Facebook, ‘he started playing a friend’s piano by ear, aged 11, and tinkered around until giving up at 17 and working in a Paris supermarket… Invited by his old home town to play in their local festival, he picked up the piano again and played so brilliantly that he was put in touch with a hot-house Russian piano coach in Paris. After four years, he was in the final of the Tchaikovsky competition, playing with an orchestra for the first time in his life.’

In the movie Debargue would come first rather than fourth (i.e. last). But that doesn’t matter, because in the eyes of the public he was the real winner.