Daniel Barenboim Quotes
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In Arab culture, music is for celebration. You don't play music at funerals.
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I used to conduct the last opera in Berlin on Sunday, get on a plane on Monday to Chicago, and start a rehearsal that same night, if it was a performance week.
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I have accumulated so many experiences, so much, that I want to be able to realize so many things. This is why I have basically given up most of my positions.
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Once you start playing a piece, there is a connection between every note. You cannot say, 'I will not concentrate on this note.' You cannot ignore things the way you do in the rest of your life.
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Music is not a profession. Music is a way of life - one that requires much professionalism.
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I have loved Elliott Carter's music for many years.
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Children in schools need to have something to do with music and learn it the way they do literature, geography and biology.
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Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.
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When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique sense of peace.
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More and more, we're used to taking things in through the eyes rather than through the ears, and opera is more of a spectacle.
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Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.
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Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.
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Any conductor who tells you that if he is approached for the directorship of the Chicago Symphony that he's not interested in it, you know perfectly well he's lying.
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Music is an art that touches the depth of human existence; an art of sounds that crosses all borders.
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The thing about Wagner is we're always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can't represent both views on stage at once.
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You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.
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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.
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I would like to be a terrorist for music education - to make a complete reform, all over the world.
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On Nov. 5, 2012, my friend Elliott Carter died in New York at the age of 103. For me, he was and remains one of the most interesting figures of music history in the past century.
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Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.
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Every note is a lifetime for itself.
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I can't stand going out to one more dinner with some Mrs. So-and-So who might leave a million dollars to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she dies.
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To play four hands requires two people who have great affinity for each other.
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I cannot be music director at La Scala and at Staatsoper. This would be unfair to one of the two institutions.