Quotes from Daniel Barenboim

I feel that the Jews have always had a special connection to this part of the world, which in geographical terms was called Palestine for so many centuries.

I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation - television and videos and all this.

I think Sharon is anti-Israeli because it's in the interest of Israel to understand the problems of the other side.

You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.

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.

In my mother's belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in.

I think the most important thing for a listener is to realize that he, too, should not listen to music in a passive way; that if you sit in a concert hall and expect to be moved or taken off your seat by the music, it will not happen.

The thing about Wagner is we're always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can't represent both views on stage at once.

'Tristan' is a very unique case, not just in Wagner's output, but in music in general. It remains contemporary no matter what else surrounds it. There is something self-renewing about it.

Most of the dramatism in Wagner comes from a very close link between the music and the language of the text. So much of the expressivity of Wagner's music dramas comes from the singers' capacity to play with the sound of the language. This kind of thing you can do very well in concert performance.

Of course there is really vile anti-Semitism in Wagner's writings, but I can't accept the idea that characters like Beckmesser and Alberich are Jewish stereotypes in disguise. Would Beckmesser be a court councillor if he was meant to be a Jewish stereotype? No Jew could occupy such a role.

Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.

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.

There is no way Israel will deal with the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not understand the suffering of the Jewish people.

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.

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

Israel is in the grip of a ghetto mentality. We have a powerful army. We have the atomic bomb. But the psychology of what comes out of Israel has the tone of the Warsaw Ghetto.

I have loved Elliott Carter's music for many years.

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.

Music has the capacity to create a greater reality.

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

Every great work of art has two faces, one towards its own time and one towards future, towards eternity.

In Arab culture, music is for celebration. You don't play music at funerals.

In order to lift a certain object from the ground, we have to use energy. But then to sustain it at that level, we have to keep on adding energy, or otherwise, the object falls to the ground. It's exactly the same thing with the sound.