Daniel Barenboim > Quotes

“Every great work of art has two faces: one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.”
― Daniel Barenboim, Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society

“I believe in the understanding of difficult situations, difficult music, or any kind of difficulties, through familiarity. Familiarity, in this case, does not breed contempt, but breeds understanding.”
― Daniel Barenboim, Edward W. Said

“Wer beruflich mit Musik zu tun hat, müsste dazu erzogen werden, Sinn dafür zu entwickeln, sich auch vielen anderen Wissensbereichen zuzuwenden, die nicht direkt mit Musik zu tun haben. Die technische Beherrschung eines Instruments, die für einen Berufsmusiker wesentlich ist, hat nur dann einen Sinn, wenn sie mit einem allgemeinen Erkenntnisprozess einhergeht, zu dem eine breite Basis von Wissen und Kultur gehören.”
― Daniel Barenboim, Musik ist alles und alles ist Musik: Erinnerungen und Einsichten

“If you look at the essential unrepeatability of music, the fact that it is different every time because it comes in a different moment - you learn many things about the world, about nature, about human beings and human relations. And therefore, it is, in many ways, the best school for life, really. And yet, at the same time, it is a means of escape from the world. And with this duality of music that we come to the paradox. How is it possible that something that can teach you so much about the world, about nature and universe, and for more religious people, about God - that something that is so clearly able to teach you so many things can serve as a means of escape from precisely those things?
Whenever we talk about music, we talk about how we are affected by it, not about it itself. In this respect, it is like God. We can't talk about God, or whatever you want to call it, but we can only talk about our reaction to a thing - some people know God exists and others refuse to admit God exists - but we cannot speak about it. We can only speak about our reaction to it.”
― Daniel Barenboim, Edward W. Said

“Recorded sound, which artificially preserves the unpreservable, increases the likelihood of listening without hearing, since it can be listened to at home or in motion, thus allowing us to reduce music to background activity and eliminate the possibility of total concentration - i.e., thought. The moral responsibility for this rests entirely with the individual human being, who can determine whether a recording is a means of instruction, rendering the music more familiar through repetition - the equivalent of rereading a passage in a book - or simply a means of distraction in the sense of the music played by the band in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, to which the philosopher Settembrini says, “The human being, unfortunately, has a tendency to imbue objects with moral authority, so as not to take the responsibility himself. Is a knife an instrument with which one can commit murder - therefore an immoral instrument - or is it an instrument with which bread can be cut and a fellow human being fed - therefore an instrument of human generosity? It is the human being’s application of it that determines its moral qualities.”
― Daniel Barenboim

“And those who were against the regime felt that music was like a kind of oxygen, because this was the one place where they could really be free. And those musicians who were in favor of the regime were only too proud that such a wonderful institution existed under such a regime.”
― Daniel Barenboim, Parallels & Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society

“The hierarchy which may not have the same rights but certainly has equal responsibility as all the other voices. This, of course, is much easier to achieve in music than in life; how difficult it is in the world to create equality within hirarchy!”
― David Barenboim

“DB: Well, in a way, this is also the difference of the politician and the statesman, isn’t it? A statesman is somebody with a vision. EWS: Somebody like Nehru or Mandela who has the vision and, at the same time, the capacity to carry it out, whatever that might involve … DB:”
― Daniel Barenboim, Parallels & Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society

“DB: You mean the Second Viennese School as refugees’ music? EWS: Yes. Exiles’ music—not only from the social world but also from the tonal world, if the tonal world by the time they inherit it is the accepted world, the world of habit and custom and a certain kind of solidity.”
― Daniel Barenboim, Parallels & Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society

“Music is everything at the same time. Music never laughs or smiles, music never cries, it always smiles and cries at the same time.”
― Daniel Barenboim

“I don’t think that we have any right to have a sort of generalized criticism, if not hatred, of the people who hated us, because then we only descend to the level of those people who persecuted us for so many years. New”
― Daniel Barenboim, Parallels & Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society