Daniel Barenboim[a] (born 15 November 1942) is a pianist and conductor who is a citizen of Argentina, Israel, Palestine, and Spain.
I always maintain that playing in an orchestra intelligently is the best school for democracy. If you play a solo, the conductor and everybody in the orchestra follows you. Then, a few bars later, the main voice goes to another instrument, another group, and then you have to go back into the collective [sound]. The art of playing in an orchestra is being able to express yourself to the maximum but always in relation to something else that is going on.
The French Revolution gave us three. . . powerful ideas, or concepts - liberty, equality and fraternity. But these ideas. . . are not only right in themselves, but they are so because they come in the proper order. You cannot have equality without liberty, and you certainly cannot have fraternity without equality. The importance of this I learnt from music, because music evolves in time, and therefore the order inevitably determines the content.
The Germans are prisoners of their past.
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.
Every great work of art has two faces, one towards its own time and one towards future, towards eternity.
Not only has the eyes taken over, but we have anaesthetised the ears through all the muzak that we hear all the time.
I can't stand being in Chicago anymore and hearing the Brahms Violin Concerto in the elevator. Because that shows me that when they come to the concert hall they listen to it in the same way.
Germany will never be a real, free thinking and free feeling friend of Israel, because it will always fall under this shadow.
Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead.
I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can't even imagine what these people went through.
In the long term, Israel's security rests on only one pillar: the Palestinians' acceptance of the country. It isn't the atom bomb that makes Israel secure.
The ear plays the role of the guide in the museum in the concert I'm taking now. We don't have an oral guide, we have to provide it ourselves. One reason why active listening is absolutely essential.
You can't expect someone born into a family with no music. . . to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.
In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.