Is classical music a means of escape from the world and all the worries it causes? It’s a notion conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim would resist. “For many people, music is here to let them forget the daily chores of life,” he says. “People have a difficult day at the office, they have a fight with their wife or their mistress, or both, they get bad news from their accountant. So they come home, exhausted, put their feet up, and put on their favorite Chopin nocturne — preferably played by me — and within three minutes they have forgotten their troubles. But 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.”
He warms to his theme, fixing me with the intense, challenging stare that has galvanized orchestras the world over. I understand now why musicians from Chicago to Berlin give him performances of such fire and intensity. “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. And being in an orchestra teaches you that you cannot be in the center all the time, that sometimes you are not the soloist but have to become part of a bigger collective spirit.”
We meet the night after Barenboim conducts the final concert in a series of Bruckner symphonies in London with the Staatskapelle Berlin. Bruckner’s Eighth was an especially thrilling, take-nothing-for-granted performance — though Barenboim tells me a couple of cellos didn’t turn up in time for the start, because they forgot there was no Mozart piano concerto preceding the symphony that night.
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“You obviously didn’t notice the cellos were weak, which is good,” he laughs.
This year, Barenboim will perform one of the biggest projects of his musical life: playing the complete symphonies of Beethoven at the BBC Proms series of concerts with his West-Eastern Divan orchestra, an ensemble that puts young Palestinian and Israeli musicians side by side, along with players from the rest of the Arab world. The series will climax with a performance of the Ninth on the same day as the Olympics opening ceremony.
The real challenge of these concerts, Barenboim says, will be the fact that he has programmed music by Pierre Boulez, the world’s greatest living composer-conductor, alongside the Beethoven.
“I had three choices,” he explains. “I could either just play Beethoven and his contemporaries. That’s not interesting to me — I wanted to make this music sound modern. So then I could try to find a different modern composer for each program; or I could find a single composer whose music could stand the tension of being sandwiched between two symphonies of Beethoven, which is not easy. How many composers could stand up to that? I thought of Elliott Carter and I thought of Harrison Birtwistle. I love Carter’s music. I think, since Haydn, there has not been a composer who is permanently in high spirits like Carter. And Birtwistle — well, I think his music is not in such high spirits, but it is wonderfully interesting. In the end, I chose Boulez because his music works in the opposite direction from Beethoven’s. Those are my three favorite contemporary composers. You see, I don’t go very far in the alphabet: Birtwistle, Boulez, Carter.”
Barenboim and Boulez go back a long way. It is nearly 50 years since they performed Bartok’s first piano concerto together in Berlin, a concert Barenboim has recalled as one of the most challenging of his life: “I felt, for the 23 minutes it takes to play the concerto, that I was on the most slippery, uncontrollable ground, for what seemed to me like 24 hours, not a few minutes.”
Barenboim was 22. Since then he has conducted Boulez’s orchestral and ensemble works, commissioned Boulez’s series of Notations; the pair have worked together frequently as soloist and conductor. “He has an outstanding intelligence and an uncompromising nature which gives him tremendous moral strength.” Does he hear these qualities in Boulez’s music, too? “Yes, oh yes. They are one unity. Boulez has a particular love of everything that is complex.”
Sometimes, the music is too complex even for Barenboim. In the first of the Beethoven Proms, audiences will hear the revolutionary amuse-bouche of Beethoven’s First, with its still shocking opening chord, followed by 45 minutes of Boulez’s explosive ensemble work, Derive II. The latter is a teeming, kaleidoscopic piece, by turns seductive and violent, the most continually dynamic of any of Boulez’s recent works. “When I started studying Derive,” Barenboim says, “I couldn’t really read the first three pages of the score. I got a recording that Pierre had conducted. So I had the score on my lap and I put the CD on — and I still couldn’t follow the damn thing. It was so complex and so fast. But then I grew to understand it and to love it. And it is a masterpiece of the first order.”
What does he think is the connection between Beethoven and Boulez? “If you look at Beethoven’s sketches, you see that he went from the most complex idea to the most simple. His sketches are much more complex than the final versions of the music. With Boulez, it is the other way round. He has a simple idea — a chord, a collection of notes — and gets a fantastic kick out of making it more interesting, more varied, more complex. The process is exactly the opposite, but like all true opposites, they are more similar than you think.” Boulez is Beethoven viewed through the wrong end of a telescope, in other words, and vice-versa.
The Beethoven/Boulez project is one realization of Barenboim’s current mission — to take music out of what he calls the “ivory tower” of isolation, whether that’s political, cultural or personal. This is what his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra project has been about ever since he founded it with Edward Said in 1999. For all the excitement of this summer’s Beethoven cycle, which will be performed in the space of a single week, Barenboim believes the West-Eastern’s real potential will only be realized “the day we can play in all the countries that are represented. The day I go on a tour and play Damascus, Amman, Tel Aviv and Cairo — then the full dimension of the Divan will come into play.” They performed in Ramallah in 2005, “and I don’t think that would be possible today. The situation is so much worse.” But he remains an optimist, even if, as he has said, “optimism is a form of self-defence.”
He lambasts the traditional training of musicians in conservatoires around the world, accusing them of isolating young performers from the realities of politics, ideas and history. How would he change this? “I would like to be a terrorist for music education — to make a complete reform, all over the world. And now is the moment to do it. A moment of financial crisis is the perfect time, because we need to show that it would be much cheaper to educate the public than to cut subsidies for theaters and orchestras in Germany, Britain, France and Italy.”
That searching stare is back. “At the moment,” he adds, “opera only appeals to a certain number of people. But if you had proper education, the same opera would appeal to 10 times that number. It would be proportionally cheaper. That’s why I need to be the Che Guevara of music education.”
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