Daniel Barenboim is a musician who grafts intellectual curiosity on to a brightly burning talent which has brought him acclaim in every phase of his career. Unusually for those who swap the piano for the conductor’s baton, he’s returned in his 60s to the piano with majestic effect. His friend Edward Said wrote that Barenboim never seems to practise, but “does what he does as a matter of course”.
Driving with him to a performance of Berg’s Wozzeck which Barenboim was to conduct, Said asked if he was nervous. “No, why should I be nervous?” replied Barenboim. “Let them be nervous!” To use Saint-Saëns’s delightful phrase, he seems to produce music as an apple tree produces apples.’
Far from being only an instinctive musician, however, Barenboim is also determined to analyse his talent. This is lucky for us, because we have the rare opportunity to hear how a master musician thinks. In Everything is Connected he emphasises that thought and study must go hand in hand with intuition. He’s impatient with musicians “who fall prey to the superstitious belief that too thorough an analysis of a piece of music will destroy the intuitive quality and the freedom of their performance”.
The link between understanding and freedom is a key to his thinking, much influenced by reading Spinoza as a teenager, and fuelled by lessons with Nadia Boulanger, who believed that “the ideal musician should think with the heart and feel with the intellect”. He constantly refers to apparently opposing qualities which for him are constructive partners: choice and limitation, emotion and rationality, leading voices and subversive accompaniments. His love of opposites received further impetus from Said, whom he praises for “his revelatory construct that parallels between ideas, topics and cultures can be of a paradoxical nature, not contradicting, but enriching one another”.
When Barenboim talks unscripted, as he did in his recent BBC Reith Lectures, he doesn’t always find his focus. But nearly all is well in this sequence of essays and interviews covering topics such as Sound and Thought, Listening and Hearing, Mozart, Schumann, Furtwangler and Israel.
At the heart of the book are his reflections on Israel and on the West Eastern Divan Orchestra, perhaps his most far-reaching achievement.
The orchestra was founded by Barenboim and Said in 1999 with the aim of bringing young Arabs and Israelis closer together through music-making. It seems no accident that the idea came from two men so in tune with paradoxical affinities. Just assembling the members of the orchestra in one place has always presented enormous difficulties. But Barenboim has no truck with isolationism; Spinoza had explained that “belief in just one view can totally sap one’s strength” and music has taught him that “there simply are no independent elements”. He uses the analogy of musical structures such as fugue and sonata form to show that a voice which states a theme all by itself is never more than a transient phenomenon, always followed by counter-subjects, contrasting themes and developments, other voices with other things to say.
“Music could be a model for society,” he writes. “It teaches us the importance of the interconnection between transparency, power and force.”
As his young Arabs and Israelis tackle great music, they discover that the other is not a monster, but a vulnerable human being like themselves. This is no small revelation in a part of the world where opposing factions refuse to recognise one another’s right to exist. To those who accuse him of being politically naive, Barenboim says, “I am not a political person … humanity has always concerned me. In that sense I feel able and, as an artist, especially qualified to analyse the situation.”–