Composer and double Oscar winner Hans Zimmer has said playing piano makes him feel like a failure.
The German music producer told the BBC: "I'm not a great player, I’m a composer" ahead of the cinema release of Hans Zimmer And Friends: Diamond In The Desert, which will play his live shows on the big screen.
In an interview broadcast on the Today programme, Zimmer said he had two weeks of piano lessons as a child and "it actually wasn’t piano lessons, it was somewhat nuclear war between him and me."
This was "because he wanted me to play other people’s music, and I, as a six-year-old, was firmly under the impression that this whole game was about" learning "how to get the stuff that’s in my head into my fingers".
Asked if he was composing music at the age of six, Zimmer said: "The operative word in music is play, we play music. So other kids played with little red cars, I played with the piano."
Asked how playing the instrument makes him feel, Zimmer said: "Like a failure."
The 67-year-old musician also opened up about the trauma of his father's death and said it "came pouring out" when he was composing for The Lion King.
The music producer told the BBC: "I didn’t really want to do a cartoon. I mean, I was doing Ridley Scott movies and, you know, proper movies.
"But my daughter, Zoe, was six years old, and I’m a dad, and dads like to show off a little, so I’m writing away at it, because the story was never quite finished.
"I’m writing away at it, and suddenly the father dies, and my father died when I was six years old, and so I tucked all that away, you know, you don’t get over it.
"You know, they say, oh the child – get over it, over the trauma. We don’t get over the trauma, we just get really good at hiding it because we don’t want to be embarrassed by it somehow.
"Suddenly, you know, all that stuff came sort of pouring out, and really it’s a love for my dad – I didn’t decide … automatically I wrote a requiem for my father."
Source: Press Association
