Singapore pianist Wang Congyu left school at 16, had no stable home in Paris and became a Steinway Artist

Today, the Clementi-raised musician performs internationally, directs music festivals and helps young pianists gain the guidance and orchestral experience he never had.

Singapore pianist Wang Congyu left school at 16 to pursue music in Paris, later building an international career as a performer and festival director. (Photo: Wang Congyu)

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When Wang Congyu sat down in an office at a concert hall in Courbevoie, northwest of Paris, he had already flown in from the south of France, taught piano masterclasses for four or five hours and asked one of his students to present the concert taking place elsewhere in the building.

Wang could have been forgiven for looking depleted when he sat down for the interview with CAN Luxury. Instead, the Singaporean concert pianist joked, gesticulated animatedly and spoke at the speed of a sprint.

This is just another day in Wang’s life. The 34-year-old, who grew up in Clementi, performs internationally, directs music festivals and has recorded albums devoted to Poulenc and Debussy. Since 2022, he has been a Steinway Artist, joining the piano maker’s international roster alongside musicians such as Diana Krall, Lang Lang and Billy Joel.

He had come a long way. When he dropped out of school and moved to Paris at 16 to study music, he was effectively homeless. He slept on friends’ couches and sometimes went weeks without a proper meal.

Once reluctant to practise, Wang began spending his teenage years searching out scores and recordings to find new music to play. (Photo: Wang Congyu)

“The only thing I was thinking about was the next day,” he said. “What you’re going to eat, where you’re going to sleep.”

On paper, Wang’s story has the contours of a classic underdog tale: A school dropout who played piano for supper became a Steinway Artist whose work now brings together young soloists, teachers, conductors and orchestras. Wang does not see it that way.

“I don’t have any success,” he said. “It’s just like survival mode.”

Yet it raises the question: How did a boy who hated the piano, walked out of school and landed in Paris without a bed become a Steinway Artist performing on international stages?

For a man who has built his life around the piano, Wang’s first encounter with it was adversarial.

“I hated it,” he said. “I was really bad at it.”

Wang was three when his parents made him learn his first tunes. His older sister played the piano and violin, excelled at school and later became a doctor. Wang describes himself as her rebellious opposite: unexceptional at school and unwilling to practise an instrument he had never chosen.

Music caught his interest at about 13, when the chapel band at Fairfield Methodist Secondary School needed a pianist. Few students could play, so Wang joined. The others encouraged him and told him he was good.

“I didn’t know I had a gift,” he said.

A scholarship took Wang to Paris at 16, but it covered tuition only – leaving him to find his own way outside the classroom. (Photo: Wang Congyu)

Their praise did what compulsory lessons had failed to do. Wang began visiting the library at the Esplanade after school, photocopying scores for 50 cents a page. He borrowed CDs, copied them onto an old laptop and filled his MP3 player with recordings. The boy once forced to practise was now hunting for something new to play.

His family remained unconvinced that music could provide a stable profession. By 16, the problem was no longer how to make Wang play the piano – it was how to stop him from abandoning everything else for it.

Determined to develop his skills, Wang applied to five music schools abroad. The Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris was the only one that replied, offering a scholarship that covered tuition but nothing beyond the classroom. He then did something that would make many Singaporean parents recoil in horror: He dropped out of school before sitting his O levels.

“I want to try it for myself, and I want to fail,” he explained.

Even at that age, Wang saw Singapore’s education system as a pressure cooker, with students competing for the same grades and conventional careers. He wanted another way.

“I wasn’t running away from home,” he said. “I was running away from that situation.”

His mother feared that music would never support him, but she helped him make the trip. With savings from teaching piano and pocket money from his mother, Wang bought his ticket to France and never looked back.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by Congyu Wang 王聪瑀 (@wang_congyu)

A post shared by Congyu Wang 王聪瑀 (@wang_congyu)

He first stayed with another young musician he had met through Facebook, then moved between the homes of classmates, acquaintances and people he had only just met. Every two or three days, Wang had to find another couch. Warm meals, too, were scarce. During one stretch of roughly three weeks, he scavenged for food and ate only once every two or three days. People he met sometimes offered him restaurant vouchers after noticing how quickly he had lost weight.

One night, Wang was playing in a Paris bar when a man trying to impress his girlfriend requested a piece. Wang obliged. In return, the man told him he could order anything he wanted from the menu.

Wang began pointing. “This, this, this, this,” he recalled, laughing and jabbing at an imaginary menu. He estimated that he ordered 20 items. The man’s girlfriend stared, unaware that the teenager at the piano was ravenous.

The instrument Wang had once resisted was now feeding him.

A Singaporean friend eventually introduced him to a church in Paris, where a family offered him a place to stay. He completed his studies at the Ecole Normale and later the Schola Cantorum. Then, in 2012, just as life in France was becoming more stable, Singapore called him home for National Service, putting his fledgling career on hold.

Wang’s first years as a pianist were shaped as much by survival as by performance. (Photo: Wang Congyu)

For part of those two years, he served in the Singapore Civil Defence Force band, where he learnt to improvise and respond to a room. “It felt like forever,” he said.

During National Service, Wang applied to become a Young Steinway Artist and was accepted. Yet no concert career awaited him when he completed his service. Some months brought engagements; others brought silence.

When performances did come, reviewers began to notice. Writing in The Straits Times in 2015, Chang Tou Liang praised Wang’s gentle touch and musical storytelling, describing him as “incapable of any ugly sound”.

Competitions offered another measure of his ability. Wang won grand prizes in Berlin and Bordeaux, along with awards in France, Indonesia and Estonia. At the Chopin International Piano Competition for Young Pianists in Slovenia, however, he placed sixth. According to Wang’s official biography, juror Francois Weigel believed Wang deserved to win and resigned from the jury in protest.

THE ISLAND WITH NO PIANO

Yet competitions did not determine where Wang would build his life. Marriage did.

Roughly two years after receiving help from the church in Paris, Wang met Julie Lu there. Lu came from Reunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean east of Madagascar, where her family ran a chain of Asian supermarkets. Building a life with her meant leaving Paris and its conservatories, concert halls and pianos.

Lu gave him a blunt account of what awaited him. “People don’t like classical music,” she told him. “We don’t have a concert hall. No pianos.”

Wang was undeterred. “We had to try it.”

Determined, he bought a nine-foot Steinway concert grand in Paris and had it shipped across the Indian Ocean. He and Lu placed it in a venue that had not been designed for classical music, announced a recital and waited.

He organised another concert. It filled again. “Every year we did it, it was full,” he said. Without suitable venues or easy access to instruments, Wang moved the Steinway between concert spaces and even took it into the mountains to perform.

The concerts proved there was an audience. Wang opened a music school that grew to between 80 and 100 students, then trained pupils to become instructors because Reunion did not have enough piano teachers.

When COVID-19 halted international travel, he remained on the island and taught for as many as 12 hours a day. He composed, improvised and posted videos online, growing his Instagram audience to more than 100,000. In June 2022, as international travel resumed, a letter in his postbox informed him that Steinway & Sons had named him a Steinway Artist.

As concert halls reopened, invitations multiplied, producing what Wang called “an explosion of concerts”. His schedule took him away from Reunion for long stretches, so he stepped back from daily lessons and left the school in the hands of the instructors he had trained.

The island once said to have no audience, no piano and too few teachers now had all three.

The school became a model for the festivals and competitions Wang went on to found. One is the Piano Island Festival, which brings young pianists together with international teachers and competition juries; its eighth edition was held in Hainan in July 2026.

Another is the Piano Concerto Festival, which held its sixth edition in 2026. It aims to give pianists something harder to obtain: repeated rehearsals with a professional symphony orchestra. After all, a pianist may spend years learning a concerto without once playing it with an orchestra; some first encounter one during a competition final, when every mistake matters.

THE MENTOR HE NEVER HAD

Now established as a Steinway Artist, Wang is focused not only on performance, but on creating opportunities for younger pianists. (Photo: Wang Congyu)

That festival was what brought Wang to the concert hall in Courbevoie, where CNA Luxury met him. Elsewhere in the building, students were rehearsing with 45 orchestral musicians under the guidance of professors and conductors. There were no rankings or prizes at stake. The students could stop, try again and learn what an orchestra demanded of them.

Wang knows what it is like to have talent without knowing what to do with it. His childhood teachers recognised his ability, he said, but none could explain how to build a performing career.

“I never met a mentor who could show me the way,” he said.

Now he introduces young musicians to teachers, conductors and orchestras. He gives them rehearsal time, professional recordings, instruction and experience performing before an audience.

“I feel like I could be that guy now for someone else,” he said.

That afternoon in Courbevoie, Wang sat downstairs while his students rehearsed and performed with a professional orchestra elsewhere in the building. One student presented the concert in his place.

At 16, Wang had arrived in Paris without a bed, regular meals or a mentor to explain what came next. That evening, his students would leave Courbevoie having played with an orchestra, worked with established teachers and met people they could turn to for advice.

For Wang, it seems, success depends less on how many stages he plays than on whether his students can reach theirs without having to find their way alone.

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如今，这位在克莱门蒂长大的音乐家在国际上演出，执导音乐节，并帮助年轻的钢琴家获得他从未有过的指导和管弦乐经验。

新加坡钢琴家王从宇16岁辍学前往巴黎追寻音乐梦想，之后作为演奏家和音乐节总监在国际乐坛崭露头角。（图片：王从宇）

这段音频是由人工智能工具生成的。

王从宇坐在巴黎西北部库尔布瓦一家音乐厅的办公室里时，他已经从法国南部飞来，上了四五个小时的钢琴大师班，并请他的一个学生在音乐厅的其他地方演奏音乐会。

王先生接受 CAN Luxury 采访时，人们或许会觉得他疲惫不堪。然而，这位新加坡钢琴演奏家却妙语连珠，手舞足蹈，语速飞快。

这只是王家卫平凡生活中的一天。这位34岁的音乐家在金文泰长大，活跃于国际舞台，执导音乐节，并录制过普朗克和德彪西的专辑。自2022年起，他成为施坦威艺术家，与戴安娜·克瑞儿、郎朗和比利·乔尔等音乐家一同加入这家钢琴制造商的国际艺术家阵容。

他一路走来实属不易。16岁那年，他辍学前往巴黎学习音乐，当时他几乎无家可归。他只能睡在朋友家的沙发上，有时甚至好几个星期都吃不上一顿像样的饭。

王聪宇曾一度不愿练习，但青少年时期他开始四处搜寻乐谱和唱片，寻找新的曲目来演奏。（图片：王聪宇）

“我当时满脑子想的都是第二天的事，”他说。“吃什么，睡哪儿。”

从表面上看，王的故事颇具经典的励志故事：一个辍学靠弹钢琴糊口的年轻人，最终成为施坦威艺术家，如今他的工作将年轻的独奏家、教师、指挥家和乐团聚集在一起。但王并不这么认为。

“我一点儿也没成功，”他说。“现在就像是在挣扎求生。”

但这引出了一个问题：一个讨厌钢琴、辍学后流落巴黎、无家可归的男孩，是如何成为在国际舞台上表演的斯坦威艺术家的呢？

对于一个将一生都奉献给钢琴的人来说，王健林与钢琴的第一次接触却是充满对抗性的。

“我讨厌它，”他说。“我真的很不擅长它。”

王三岁时，父母就让他学习第一首曲子。他的姐姐会弹钢琴和小提琴，学习成绩优异，后来成为了一名医生。王自称是姐姐叛逆的反面：学习成绩平平，也不愿意练习自己从未选择过的乐器。

大约13岁时，音乐引起了他的兴趣。当时，费尔菲尔德卫理公会中学的教堂乐队需要一位钢琴手。会弹钢琴的学生不多，于是王加入了乐队。其他同学鼓励他，并称赞他弹得很好。

“我不知道自己有这种天赋，”他说。

王聪宇16岁时凭借奖学金前往巴黎，但奖学金只涵盖学费，课外学习生活仍需他自己摸索。（图片：王聪宇）

他们的赞扬起到了强制课程未能达到的作用。放学后，王开始去滨海艺术中心的图书馆，以每页50分的价格复印乐谱。他借阅CD，将音乐复制到一台旧笔记本电脑上，并将MP3播放器装满录音。这个曾经被迫练习的男孩，如今却在寻找新的乐曲来演奏。

他的家人始终不相信音乐能成为一份稳定的职业。到了16岁，问题不再是如何让王学钢琴，而是如何阻止他为了音乐放弃其他一切。

为了提升自己的音乐技能，王申请了五所海外音乐院校。巴黎高等师范音乐学院是唯一一所回复他的学校，并提供了一份涵盖学费的奖学金，但除此之外，其他方面一概不予资助。接下来，他做了一件会让许多新加坡家长瞠目结舌的事情：在参加O水准考试之前就辍学了。

“我想亲自尝试一下，而且我想失败，”他解释说。

即使在那个年纪，王也认为新加坡的教育体系像一个高压锅，学生们为了同样的成绩和传统的职业而竞争。他想要另一种方式。

“我不是离家出走，”他说，“我是逃离那种环境。”

他的母亲担心音乐无法养活他，但她还是资助他踏上了旅程。王用教钢琴攒下的积蓄和母亲给的零花钱买了去法国的机票，从此义无反顾地踏上了旅程。

在 Instagram 上查看此帖子 由 Congyu Wang 王聪瑀 (@wang_congyu) 分享的帖子

Congyu Wang 王聪瑀 (@wang_congyu) 分享的帖子

他先是借住在一位通过Facebook认识的年轻音乐人家里，之后辗转于同学、熟人和刚认识的人家中。每隔两三天，王就得另找沙发。热乎乎的饭菜也十分匮乏。有大约三周的时间，他四处觅食，两三天才能吃上一顿饭。有些人注意到他瘦得很快，便会给他送些餐馆代金券。

一天晚上，王在巴黎一家酒吧演奏，一个男人为了讨好女友，点了一首曲子。王答应了。作为回报，男人告诉他，可以随意点菜单上的任何菜。

王开始指点。“这个，这个，这个，这个，”他一边笑着一边回忆，仿佛在指着一份菜单。他估计自己点了20道菜。男人的女友盯着他看，丝毫没有意识到钢琴前的少年已经饿得前胸贴后背了。

王曾经抗拒的乐器，现在却在滋养着他。

一位新加坡朋友最终把他介绍到巴黎的一间教堂，那里的一户人家收留了他。他在巴黎高等师范学院完成了学业，之后又进入圣咏学院深造。然而，就在他于法国的生活逐渐稳定下来之际，2012年，新加坡召他回国服兵役，他刚刚起步的职业生涯也因此被迫中断。

王聪宇早年的钢琴生涯，与其说是为了演奏，不如说是为了生存。（图片：王聪宇）

在那两年中的部分时间里，他曾在新加坡民防部队乐队服役，在那里他学会了即兴演奏和根据现场情况调整演奏方式。“感觉像过了很久很久，”他说。

服兵役期间，王申请成为施坦威青年艺术家并被录取。然而，退伍后，他的音乐会生涯并未如期而至。有些月份演出不断，有些月份则一片沉寂。

当演出真正到来时，评论家们开始注意到他。2015年，《海峡时报》的张头良撰文称赞王的细腻触键和音乐叙事能力，并形容他“演奏不出任何难听的声音”。

比赛也展现了他的实力。王在柏林和波尔多的比赛中荣获大奖，并在法国、印度尼西亚和爱沙尼亚也斩获奖项。然而，在斯洛文尼亚举行的肖邦国际青年钢琴比赛中，他仅获得第六名。据王的官方传记记载，评委弗朗索瓦·魏格尔认为王理应获奖，并因此愤而辞去评委职务以示抗议。

没有钢琴的岛屿

然而，比赛结果并没有决定王的人生方向，婚姻才是。

在巴黎接受教会帮助大约两年后，王女士在那里遇到了朱莉·卢。卢女士来自留尼汪岛，这是位于印度洋马达加斯加东部的一个法国岛屿，她的家族在那里经营着一家连锁亚洲超市。与她共建未来意味着离开巴黎，离开那里的音乐学院、音乐厅和钢琴。

卢直截了当地告诉他，他将面临什么。“人们不喜欢古典音乐，”她告诉他，“我们没有音乐厅，也没有钢琴。”

王并未气馁。“我们必须试一试。”

他下定决心，在巴黎买了一架九英尺的斯坦威音乐会三角钢琴，然后把它运过印度洋。他和卢把钢琴放在一个原本并非为古典音乐设计的场地，宣布将举办一场音乐会，然后静待佳音。

他又组织了一场音乐会，再次座无虚席。“我们每年都办，每次都爆满，”他说。由于缺乏合适的场地和便捷的乐器获取途径，王家卫不得不把斯坦威钢琴搬到不同的音乐厅，甚至把它带到山上演出。

音乐会证明了确实存在听众群体。王开办了一所音乐学校，学生人数发展到80到100人，之后他又培训学生成为教师，因为留尼汪岛的钢琴教师不够用。

新冠疫情导致国际旅行停滞后，他留在岛上，每天教课长达12个小时。他作曲、即兴演奏，并将视频发布到网上，Instagram粉丝增长到超过10万。2022年6月，随着国际旅行的恢复，他收到了一封信，通知他斯坦威父子公司授予他“斯坦威艺术家”的称号。

随着音乐厅重新开放，演出邀请纷至沓来，王先生称之为“音乐会的爆发式增长”。他的日程安排让他经常长时间无法留在留尼汪，因此他停止了日常授课，将学校交由他亲自培养的教师们管理。

据说这座岛屿曾经没有观众，没有钢琴，教师也寥寥无几，而现在这三样东西都拥有了。

这所学校成为了王先生后来创办的各种音乐节和比赛的典范。其中之一是钢琴岛音乐节，该音乐节汇聚了年轻的钢琴家、国际教师和比赛评委；第八届音乐节于2026年7月在海南举行。

另一个例子是钢琴协奏曲节，该节日于2026年举办了第六届。它旨在为钢琴家提供一些更难获得的机会：与专业交响乐团反复排练。毕竟，一位钢琴家可能花费数年时间学习一首协奏曲，却从未与乐团合作演奏过；有些人甚至在比赛决赛中才第一次接触协奏曲，而那时每一个错误都至关重要。

他从未拥有过的导师

如今已是施坦威艺术家的王聪宇，不仅专注于演奏，也致力于为年轻钢琴家创造机会。（图片：王聪宇）

正是那次音乐节将王带到了库尔布瓦的音乐厅，CNA Luxury 的记者在那里采访了他。在音乐厅的另一边，学生们正在教授和指挥的指导下，与 45 位管弦乐演奏家一起排练。没有排名，也没有奖项。学生们可以随时停下来，重新练习，学习管弦乐队对他们的要求。

王深知拥有天赋却不知如何发挥的滋味。他说，他儿时的老师们都认可他的才能，但却没有人能告诉他如何才能走上演艺之路。

他说：“我从未遇到过能指引我方向的导师。”

现在，他为年轻音乐家们引荐老师、指挥家和乐团。他为他们提供排练时间、专业录音、指导以及在观众面前表演的经验。

“我觉得我现在可以成为别人的那个人了，”他说。

那天下午在库尔布瓦，王老师坐在楼下，看着他的学生们在楼里的其他地方与专业乐团排练和演出。一位学生代替他主持了这场音乐会。

16岁时，王来到巴黎，没有床位，没有固定的饭菜，也没有导师指导他未来的方向。那天晚上，他的学生们离开库尔布瓦时，已经与乐团合作演出，师从名师，并结识了可以寻求建议的人。

对王来说，成功似乎不在于他能参加多少场演出，而在于他的学生能否顺利到达自己的舞台，而不是独自摸索前进。

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