Daniel Barenboim Quotes
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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.
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I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.
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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.
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I think Sharon is anti-Israeli because it's in the interest of Israel to understand the problems of the other side.
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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.
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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.
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I'm one of the ones who believed the Iraq War was a complete mistake from the very beginning.
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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.
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There is no way Israel will deal with the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not understand the suffering of the Jewish people.
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I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.
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Playing and listening to music gives you a sense of fulfilment because you have to put everything in you at its disposal.
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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.
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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.
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Either you live by the barometer of the music critics, or you live by your own. I choose the latter.
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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.
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When you love somebody and they die young and you are young, too, it is very hard.
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'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.
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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.
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There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.
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I get no satisfaction just showing myself in every corner of the world every week.
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I don't believe in changing the unchangeable.
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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.
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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.
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When I played my first concert with an orchestra, I was eight years old in Berlin.