When I played my first concert with an orchestra, I was eight years old in Berlin.
— Daniel Barenboim
I cannot be music director at La Scala and at Staatsoper. This would be unfair to one of the two institutions.
When you get to be 103, modernism is a very wide concept.
In Arab culture, music is for celebration. You don't play music at funerals.
When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique sense of peace.
Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.
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.
An hour of violin lessons in Berlin is an hour where you get the child interested in music. An hour in a violin lesson in Palestine is an hour away from violence, is an hour away from fundamentalism.
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.
I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.
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.
To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations.
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.
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.
In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.
To play four hands requires two people who have great affinity for each other.
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.
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.
Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behaviour and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society.
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 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.
You can't expect someone born into a family with no music... to understand when I'm conducting the Schoenberg Variations.
I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.
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.
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.
Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.
US presidents can make all the commitments and declarations they want until they are blue in the face, in the Muslim world they will always be perceived as partisan.
Sound is often talked about in a very subjective way, as if it had a colour. This is a bright sound, this is a dark sound. I don't believe in that because I think that is much too subjective.
Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease.
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.
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.
The Iranian government still denies the Holocaust - so you can't take them seriously. And the Israeli government spreads rumours and disinformation about Iran - because it needs to for the creation of panic. I find these theological states - and in this respect, Israel and Iran are twin brothers - very, very dangerous.
The greatness of a musician is measured by the degree of fanaticism he brings to his playing.
Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.
I would like to be a terrorist for music education - to make a complete reform, all over the world.
For many people, music is here to let them forget the daily chores of life.
The Barenboim Foundation has nothing to do with politics.
When you love somebody and they die young and you are young, too, it is very hard.
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.
In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.
Now the first step has to be taken, the step towards democracy. This step is full of risks, and requires trust on all sides. We don't know where it will lead. But if we just stand still, we will have no chance of escaping the violence.
Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead.
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.
Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.
