Daniel Barenboim Quotes
-
The Barenboim Foundation has nothing to do with politics.
-
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.
-
I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.
-
I think what history has done to Jewish people, frankly, cannot be made good by giving them a piece of land.
-
I'm one of the ones who believed the Iraq War was a complete mistake from the very beginning.
-
When we talk about music, we talk about our reaction to it. One person might say that music is so poetic, while another says it's all mathematics. Yet another might say it's about sensuality, and so on. That's all true. But music is not just one of these things. It's everything all at once.
-
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.
-
Controversial means somebody who makes people think. And if you are afraid of people who will be against you, you might as well stay home and do nothing.
-
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.
-
Playing and listening to music gives you a sense of fulfilment because you have to put everything in you at its disposal.
-
There is no way Israel will deal with the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not understand the suffering of the Jewish people.
-
I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.
-
Most of the dramatism in Wagner comes from a very close link between the music and the language of the text. So much of the expressivity of Wagner's music dramas comes from the singers' capacity to play with the sound of the language. This kind of thing you can do very well in concert performance.
-
Either you live by the barometer of the music critics, or you live by your own. I choose the latter.
-
When you love somebody and they die young and you are young, too, it is very hard.
-
'Tristan' is a very unique case, not just in Wagner's output, but in music in general. It remains contemporary no matter what else surrounds it. There is something self-renewing about it.
-
You find Jews, Irish, and Italians in every orchestra.
-
Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner's writings, but I can't accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise. Would Beckmesser be a court councillor if he was meant to be a Jewish stereotype? No Jew could occupy such a role.
-
In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.
-
I get no satisfaction just showing myself in every corner of the world every week.
-
The problem with listening to music today is that there's so much of it everywhere. We've got used to hearing music without actually listening to it.
-
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.
-
In order to lift a certain object from the ground, we have to use energy. But then to sustain it at that level, we have to keep on adding energy, or otherwise, the object falls to the ground. It's exactly the same thing with the sound.
-
I was never really interested in an operatic post, but I took on the Bastille because it seemed a unique opportunity to build an opera ensemble from scratch, and to deal with all the disciplines that go into opera - the music, the staging and the singing - in an interrelated way.