Daniel Barenboim Quotes

Music has the capacity to create a greater reality.

And in English you have this wonderful difference between listening and hearing, and that you can hear without listening, and you can listen and not hear.

Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease.

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 towards its own time and one towards future, towards eternity.

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

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.

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

Not only has the eyes taken over, but we have anaesthetised the ears through all the muzak that we hear all the time.

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.

I can't stand being in Chicago anymore and hearing the Brahms Violin Concerto in the elevator. Because that shows me that when they come to the concert hall they listen to it in the same way.

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.

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.

The ear plays the role of the guide in the museum in the concert I'm taking now. We don't have an oral guide, we have to provide it ourselves. One reason why active listening is absolutely essential.

The Steinway piano is such an incomparable instrument. Due to its virtues, I am able to express all my musical feelings.

I have the greatest respect for the survivors of the Holocaust. We can't even imagine what these people went through.

Today, conducting is a question of ego: a lot of people believe they are actually playing the music.

European anti-Semitism goes much further back than to the partition of Palestine and the establishment of Israel in 1948. It even goes further back than the Holocaust.

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.

I hope that my new status will be an example of Israeli-Palestinian co-existence, I believe that the destinies of the Israeli people and the Palestinian people are inextricably linked.

The Germans are prisoners of their past.

Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead.

I love conducting. What I'm tired of is music administration. I don't want that. I just want to make music.

An Israeli who thinks that his government is doing everything right wouldn't join the Divan Orchestra in the first place.

There are probably many people in Israel who believe that Wagner, who died in 1883, lived in Berlin in 1942 and was friends with Hitler.

Germany will never be a real, free thinking and free feeling friend of Israel, because it will always fall under this shadow.

I don't believe that the entire world is constantly anti-Semitic.

If a man dreams about sleeping with Marilyn Monroe, he's certainly entitled to that. But when he wakes up, he has to acknowledge that he is married to someone else.

I'm not naive. I know perfectly well that there isn't a single Arab or Muslim in the world who would say: There has to be a Jewish state in the Middle East.

Israel's strategy cannot be to constantly confront the Palestinians with the history of the Holocaust, but instead to show them that Israel is a reality.

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

In the long term, Israel's security rests on only one pillar: the Palestinians' acceptance of the country. It isn't the atom bomb that makes Israel secure.

In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.

We need to take music out of the ivory tower - both for musicians and for the public. Otherwise, classical music will not survive the 21st century.