Daniel Barenboim
Daniel Barenboim
Daniel Barenboim, KBEis a pianist and conductor who is a citizen of Argentina, Israel, Palestine and Spain. He is general music director of the Berlin State Opera, and the Staatskapelle Berlin; he previously served as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris and La Scala in Milan. Barenboim is known for his work with the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, a Seville-based orchestra of young Arab and Israeli musicians, and as a resolute critic of the Israeli occupation...
NationalityArgentinian
ProfessionPianist
Date of Birth15 November 1942
CityBuenos Aires, Argentina
In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.
You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.
Now the first step has to be taken, the step towards democracy. This step is full of risks, and requires trust on all sides. We don't know where it will lead. But if we just stand still, we will have no chance of escaping the violence.
The Steinway piano is such an incomparable instrument. Due to its virtues, I am able to express all my musical feelings.
The tempo is the suitcase. If the suitcase is too small, everything is completely wrinkled. If the tempo is too fast, everything becomes so scrambled you can't understand it.
Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.
I always maintain that playing in an orchestra intelligently is the best school for democracy. If you play a solo, the conductor and everybody in the orchestra follows you. Then, a few bars later, the main voice goes to another instrument, another group, and then you have to go back into the collective [sound]. The art of playing in an orchestra is being able to express yourself to the maximum but always in relation to something else that is going on.
I'm sure that there are many Israelis who dream of waking up one day to find the Palestinians gone. And there are many Palestinians who dream of going to bed at night and waking up the next morning to find the Israelis gone.
I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can't even imagine what these people went through.
In the long term, Israel's security rests on only one pillar: the Palestinians' acceptance of the country. It isn't the atom bomb that makes Israel secure.
If a man dreams about sleeping with Marilyn Monroe, he's certainly entitled to that. But when he wakes up, he has to acknowledge that he is married to someone else.
What the world is saying to us human beings is, 'Don't stick to the old ways, learn to think anew.' And that's what musicians do every day.
It's funny, because in 1970 I met the Beatles quite by a chance at a party. It was the Beethoven bicentenary, and I was then also playing the Beethoven Sonatas. And that's all they wanted to hear about - I wanted to talk about them, and all they wanted to talk about was Beethoven.
For many people, music is here to let them forget the daily chores of life.