A biography for Daniel Barenboimhasn’t been written yet.
“You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.”
“To play four hands requires two people who have great affinity for each other.”
“The greatness of a musician is measured by the degree of fanaticism he brings to his playing.”
“There is too much employer-employee relationship in America. I wish the musicians would feel that many decisions have to do with them and not delegate everything to management or to the board or to the committee. This is why you get a sense of pride in some of the European orchestras: because they are part of the decision-making.”
“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.”
“Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.”
“Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead.”
“I used to conduct the last opera in Berlin on Sunday, get on a plane on Monday to Chicago, and start a rehearsal that same night, if it was a performance week.”
“Children in schools need to have something to do with music and learn it the way they do literature, geography and biology.”
“Playing and listening to music gives you a sense of fulfilment because you have to put everything in you at its disposal.”
“Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.”
“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.”
“The Barenboim Foundation has nothing to do with politics.”
“I think what history has done to Jewish people, frankly, cannot be made good by giving them a piece of land.”
“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.”
“I have loved Elliott Carter's music for many years.”
“You used to queue for three days and two nights for tickets for Rubinstein. People stayed in the queue for the whole day.”
“I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.”
“Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.”
“The problem with listening to music today is that there's so much of it everywhere. We've got used to hearing music without actually listening to it.”