Daniel Barenboim Quotes
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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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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.
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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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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 think the most important thing for a listener is to realize that he, too, should not listen to music in a passive way; that if you sit in a concert hall and expect to be moved or taken off your seat by the music, it will not happen.
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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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The Barenboim Foundation has nothing to do with politics.
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I think what history has done to Jewish people, frankly, cannot be made good by giving them a piece of land.
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Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease.
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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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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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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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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.
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I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.
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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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An hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get the child interested in music. An hour in a violin lesson in Palestine is an hour away from violence, is an hour away from fundamentalism.
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In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.
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You find Jews, Irish, and Italians in every orchestra.
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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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You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.
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The Iranian government still denies the Holocaust - so you can't take them seriously. And the Israeli government spreads rumours and disinformation about Iran - because it needs to for the creation of panic. I find these theological states - and in this respect, Israel and Iran are twin brothers - very, very dangerous.
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Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.
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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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Either you live by the barometer of the music critics, or you live by your own. I choose the latter.