Bacqueryrisse, were married on 7 June 1947. They made their home in Paris, living in the Avenue Mozart. They had two children, Isabelle and Jean-Jacques. Each year, they holidayed at their house on Corsica, where Jean-Pierre was able to indulge his passion for boating, fishing and photography. Well known for his love of good food, he liked to maintain a private rule wherever he went on tour that he would eat "only the cuisine of the country" he was in and he looked forward to his post-concert dinners with relish. He developed a particular fondness for Japanese cuisine, and in 1981 wrote an introduction to The Book of Sushi written by a chef and a master sushi teacher. Rampal's autobiography Music, My Love appeared in 1989 (published by Random House). Leaving the stage In later years, Rampal took up the conductor's baton with more frequency but he continued to play well into his late 70s. The last work of importance dedicated to him was Krzysztof Penderecki's Flute Concerto which he premiered in Switzerland in 1992, followed by its first performance in America at Lincoln Center. Rampal's last public recital was held at the Theatre Villamarta in Jerez de la Frontera (Spain) in November 1999, when he was 77; he performed works by Bach, Mozart, Kuhlau and Mendelssohn. His last recording was made with the Pasquier Trio and flautist Claudi Arimany (trio and quartets by Mozart and Hoffmeister) in Paris in December 1999. After Rampal died in Paris of heart failure in May 2000 at age 78, French President Jacques Chirac led the tributes, saying "his flute spoke to the heart. A light in the musical world has just flickered out." Flautist Eugenia Zukerman observed: "He played with such a rich palette of color in a way that few people had done before and no one since. He had an ability to imbue sound with texture and clarity and emotional content. He was a dazzling virtuoso, but more than anything he was a supreme poet." The trustees and staff of Carnegie Hall in New York, where Rampal had performed 45 times over a 29-year period, hailed him as "one of the greatest flutists of the 20th Century and one of the greatest musical spirits of our time." The obituary in Le Monde claimed him to be no less than "L'inventeur de la flute" and celebrated all the musical characteristics that charmed