Top 55 Daniel Barenboim Quotes

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.

Any conductor who tells you that if he is approached for the directorship of the Chicago Symphony that he’s not interested in it, you know perfectly well he’s lying.

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 know so many Irish musicians. They’re all over, because there has been so much emigration from Ireland. Like the Jews.

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

Music is not a profession. Music is a way of life – one that requires much professionalism.

I get no satisfaction just showing myself in every corner of the world every week.

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.

Every note is a lifetime for itself.

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.

The historical importance of a composer does not always go hand in hand with the quality of their work.

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

The thing about Wagner is we’re always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can’t represent both views on stage at once.

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.

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

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.

You find Jews, Irish, and Italians in every orchestra.

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.

When I played my first concert with an orchestra, I was eight years old in Berlin.

More and more, we’re used to taking things in through the eyes rather than through the ears, and opera is more of a spectacle.

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

I think what history has done to Jewish people, frankly, cannot be made good by giving them a piece of land.

I cannot be music director at La Scala and at Staatsoper. This would be unfair to one of the two institutions.

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

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.

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we’re not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.

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.

Either you live by the barometer of the music critics, or you live by your own. I choose the latter.

I have accumulated so many experiences, so much, that I want to be able to realize so many things. This is why I have basically given up most of my positions.

I don’t think I’m anti-Israeli.

You don’t go out and play Beethoven’s ‘Opus 111’ without having rethought about it every time you play.

I have loved Elliott Carter’s music for many years.

Live life to the full, and become more curious every day. The more you find out about life, the richer your music-making will be.

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.

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.

I think Sharon is anti-Israeli because it’s in the interest of Israel to understand the problems of the other side.

On Nov. 5, 2012, my friend Elliott Carter died in New York at the age of 103. For me, he was and remains one of the most interesting figures of music history in the past century.

Most of the time I spend looking for the 25th hour in the day, the ninth day in the week, the 32nd day in the month and the 367th, eighth or 70th day in the year because I feel I have a very rich life.

I am convinced that 100 years from now, people will talk about Elliott Carter as one of the most important figures in the second half of 20th-century music.

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

You used to queue for three days and two nights for tickets for Rubinstein. People stayed in the queue for the whole day.

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.

People need to have enough to eat and have work and money. But there are other things that are important.

In Arab culture, music is for celebration. You don’t play music at funerals.

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

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.

Music is an art that touches the depth of human existence; an art of sounds that crosses all borders.

There is no way Israel will deal with the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not understand the suffering of the Jewish people.

The greatness of a musician is measured by the degree of fanaticism he brings to his playing.

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.

‘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.

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.

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

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

The Barenboim Foundation has nothing to do with politics.