Daniel Barenboim Quotes
-
Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.
-
I cannot be music director at La Scala and at Staatsoper. This would be unfair to one of the two institutions.
-
It is always interesting and sometimes even important to have intimate knowledge of a composer's life, but it is not essential in order to understand the composer's works.
-
I don't like possessions.
-
I am convinced that 100 years from now, people will talk about Elliott Carter as one of the most important figures in the second half of 20th-century music.
-
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.
-
US presidents can make all the commitments and declarations they want until they are blue in the face, in the Muslim world they will always be perceived as partisan.
-
We need to take music out of the ivory tower - both for musicians and for the public. Otherwise, classical music will not survive the 21st century.
-
We need a certain amount of energy to produce the sound. But then to sustain it, we have to give more energy, or otherwise, it goes and it dies in silence. And therefore, sound is absolutely, inextricably connected to time, the length of time.
-
In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.
-
Jewish intellectuals contributed a great deal to insure that Europe became a continent of humanism, and it is with these humanist ideals that Europe must now intervene in the Middle East conflict.
-
To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.
-
I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.
-
Every concert I've finished with the knowledge I've played a fistful of wrong notes.
-
I know so many Irish musicians. They're all over, because there has been so much emigration from Ireland. Like the Jews.
-
There are wonderful restaurants in London. I love Indian food and I like Arab food, and I go very often to the Arab restaurant Noura.
-
Israel is in the grip of a ghetto mentality. We have a powerful army. We have the atomic bomb. But the psychology of what comes out of Israel has the tone of the Warsaw Ghetto.
-
I don't think I'm anti-Israeli.
-
No one can be an artist without a rich inner life.
-
I maintain music is not here to make us forget about life. It's also here to teach us about life: the fact that everything starts and ends, the fact that every sound is in danger of disappearing, the fact that everything is connected - the fact that we live and we die.
-
I liked very much when we lived in Hampstead. We would go for walks on the Heath. I liked it better than living in the centre of town.
-
I am permanently relaxed.
-
Live life to the full, and become more curious every day. The more you find out about life, the richer your music-making will be.
-
There is too much employer-employee relationship in America. I wish the musicians would feel that many decisions have to do with them and not delegate everything to management or to the board or to the committee. This is why you get a sense of pride in some of the European orchestras: because they are part of the decision-making.