Daniel Barenboim Quotations

The tempo is the suitcase. If the suitcase is too small, everything is completely wrinkled. If the tempo is too fast, everything becomes so scrambled you can't understand it.

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.

What the world is saying to us human beings is, 'Don't stick to the old ways, learn to think anew.' And that's what musicians do every day.

Now the first step has to be taken, the step towards democracy. This step is full of risks, and requires trust on all sides. We don't know where it will lead. But if we just stand still, we will have no chance of escaping the violence.

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.

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.

When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique sense of peace.

For many people, music is here to let them forget the daily chores of life.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease.

I would like to be a terrorist for music education - to make a complete reform, all over the world.

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.

Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead.

Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.

To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.

Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.

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.

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.

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.

Once you start playing a piece, there is a connection between every note. You cannot say, 'I will not concentrate on this note.' You cannot ignore things the way you do in the rest of your life.

You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.

Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behaviour and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society.

I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.

I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.

In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.

In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.

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.

When I came here, I had the feeling that I had in front of me a most wonderful high quality piece of antique furniture. It was full of dust and needed repair and polishing. I think we have removed the dust and made the repairs.

He is right, but what's wrong with that?

It is always interesting and sometimes even important to have intimate knowledge of a composer's life, but it is not essential in order to understand the composer's works.

I think there were people in the press who knew the truth, but who regarded Jackie as a national treasure - quite rightly - and didn't want to cause her any distress.

The Steinway piano is such an incomparable instrument. Due to its virtues, I am able to express all my musical feelings.

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.

I hope that my new status will be an example of Israeli-Palestinian co-existence, I believe that the destinies of the Israeli people and the Palestinian people are inextricably linked.

An Israeli who thinks that his government is doing everything right wouldn't join the Divan Orchestra in the first place.

There are probably many people in Israel who believe that Wagner, who died in 1883, lived in Berlin in 1942 and was friends with Hitler.

Wagner exploited all forms of expression at a composer's disposal - harmony, dynamics, orchestration - to the extreme. His music is highly emotional, and at the same time Wagner has extraordinary control over the effect he achieves.

I'm not naïve. I know perfectly well that there isn't a single Arab or Muslim in the world who would say: There has to be a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Israel's strategy cannot be to constantly confront the Palestinians with the history of the Holocaust, but instead to show them that Israel is a reality.

I'm sure that there are many Israelis who dream of waking up one day to find the Palestinians gone. And there are many Palestinians who dream of going to bed at night and waking up the next morning to find the Israelis gone.

If a man dreams about sleeping with Marilyn Monroe, he's certainly entitled to that. But when he wakes up, he has to acknowledge that he is married to someone else.

I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can't even imagine what these people went through.

Germany will never be a real, free thinking and free feeling friend of Israel, because it will always fall under this shadow.

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.

I don't believe that the entire world is constantly anti-Semitic.

The Germans are prisoners of their past.

European anti-Semitism goes much further back than to the partition of Palestine and the establishment of Israel in 1948. It even goes further back than the Holocaust.

I have heard Ori Kam on several occasions over the last few years and have always been deeply impressed with his playing. He possesses a rare combination of musical talent, technical facility, intelligence, and charisma, and he is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary young artists I have heard in recent years.

Every great work of art has two faces, one towards its own time and one towards future, towards eternity.

Today, conducting is a question of ego: a lot of people believe they are actually playing the music.

But the ear, let us not forget, starts operating on the forty-fifth day of the pregnancy of a woman. Seven and a half months advance over the eye...(but) what do we do in our society, in our civilisation, to continue this process?

Sound is often talked about in a very subjective way, as if it had a colour. This is a bright sound, this is a dark sound. I don't believe in that because I think that is much too subjective.

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.

Not only has the eyes taken over, but we have anaesthetised the ears through all the muzak that we hear all the time.

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.

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.

In times of totalitarian or autocratic rule, music (indeed culture in general) is often the only avenue of independent thought. It is the only way people can meet as equals, and exchange ideas. Culture then becomes primarily the voice of the oppressed and it takes over from politics as a driving force for change.

And in English you have this wonderful difference between listening and hearing, and that you can hear without listening, and you can listen and not hear.

Music has the capacity to create a greater reality.

When you love somebody and they die young and you are young, too, it is very hard.

Anti-Semitic? What is anti-Semitic about it? ...There is no logic to this claim.

The Barenboim Foundation has nothing to do with politics.

The lack of musical education means that music is in danger of gradually losing its place in society.

Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.

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.