Chopin. Schumann. Brahms. Martin. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? William Martin Joel may just have to escape back to his original Piano Man stage name — Billy Martin — to pull off his ensuing musical conquest to become a classical composer.

“For the last few years, I’ve been writing instrumental piano music, classical music,” Billy Joel told The Kansas City Star last week. “Not late 20th-century, atonal, modern classical music, but romantic, mid-19th-century music.

“I rediscovered classical music about a dozen years ago. I put on some Beethoven, and it intoxicated me. I’m not aiming to create that kind of experience, but I’m going to give it my best shot.”

And why not? Joel has done everything else.

Just in the last year, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, received an Award of Merit from the American Music Awards and broke the $100 million mark for total record sales.

From the opening note of “Piano Man” to the closing beat of “In The Middle Of The Night,” Joel served a constant platter of tasty pop to starving music fans for 30 years.

But if his own declaration can be trusted, the serpentine chef is ready to move on.

“I’ll still play — which means you go out and play somewhere and go home,” Joel told the San Jose Mercury News in April. “[When we tour], we stay out for at least nine months, sometimes two years. Essentially, we live on the road, and I’ve been doing that since I was 20. And I’ve had it.”

This month, Joel is playing nine dates in preparation for a New Year’s Eve show at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. After that, the focus will be on classical music.

“I love rock ‘n’ roll. I’ll always love rock ‘n’ roll,” he told The Times-Picayune in New Orleans in November. “But to keep playing my own stuff over and over again is no longer a challenge for me. I start to get bored; my mind starts wandering.”

Joel hasn’t written a pop song since 1992. His last was the final cut on his “River of Dreams” record, “Famous Last Words,” a song he calls a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“I suspected at the time that this was the end of an era for me, that I was closing back,” Joel told The Times-Picayune.

If 1992 was the end, 1953 was the beginning. Billy Joel had just begun piano lessons, in which he would sneak rock ‘n’ roll into classical pieces when his parents were out of the room.

After stints with a few Long Island bands, including the heavy metal Attila, he signed his first solo deal in 1972 and released a live version of “Captain Jack.”

But a contractual dispute forced the artist to disappear to the West Coast, where he played in piano bars until Columbia Records tracked him down and offered him a deal.

Joel recorded three albums, including “Piano Man,” prior to his 1977 breakthrough effort, “The Stranger,” which stood as the label’s biggest selling record for eight years.

His follow-up release, “52nd St.,” garnered Joel his first Grammy Awards (Record of the Year and Song of the Year for “Just The Way You Are”).

During the ’80s, Joel was consistently in headlines, whether it was for his hand-crushing motorcycle accident, his marriage to Christie Brinkley (after whom he penned “Uptown Girl”) or his performances in Moscow and Leningrad — the first rock concerts in the former Soviet Union by a U.S. pop star.

The ’90s have been less busy, though Joel has continued to support worldwide causes, such as the Kobe earthquake efforts in Japan and the AIDS Project Los Angeles.

Recently, Joel has been boasting his latest achievement — a professional classical pianist performing his work at prestigious places such as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center.

“I’m sure Columbia is scratching its head, wondering what to do with this,” Joel told the Star. “But as David Letterman once said to me, ‘Apparently, you’ve made so much money, you can afford to write whatever you want.'”

Joel says he has enough stuff to release a classical album, though he is more focused on writing it than marketing it.

“I know a lot of artists go through periods of wondering, ‘Should I keep doing this?'” Joel recently told The Atlanta Journal and Constitution. “But look at what others do. Paul Simon wrote a musical. Sting is doing Disney animation. Randy Newman wrote a musical. Buffet did a musical. James Taylor is playing with an orchestra. Elton wrote a musical. We’re all going for Act II. Rock’s vitality and power come from that teen-age angst, a young person’s hormonal rage and joy. Are we supposed to make believe we’re at that point in our lives when we’re middle aged? If we’ve done a good job … Nexxxt!”

And so it goes.