Daniel Barenboim Quotes
-
I don't like possessions.
-
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.
-
Every note is a lifetime for itself.
-
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.
-
In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.
-
I cannot be music director at La Scala and at Staatsoper. This would be unfair to one of the two institutions.
-
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.
-
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 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.
-
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.
-
I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation - television and videos and all this.
-
I am the conductor for life of the Staatskapelle in Berlin, which fills me with tremendous joy because I feel absolutely at one with them. When we play, I have a feeling that together we manage to create one collective lung for the whole orchestra so that everybody in the stage breathes the music in the same way.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 don't think I'm anti-Israeli.
-
To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.
-
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 know so many Irish musicians. They're all over, because there has been so much emigration from Ireland. Like the Jews.
-
No one can be an artist without a rich inner life.
-
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 no way Israel will deal with the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not understand the suffering of the Jewish people.
-
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.