Quotes from Daniel Barenboim

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

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.

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.

You used to queue for three days and two nights for tickets for Rubinstein. People stayed in the queue for the whole day.

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.

I am permanently relaxed.

On Nov. 5, 2012, my friend Elliott Carter died in New York at the age of 103. For me, he was and remains one of the most interesting figures of music history in the past century.

The historical importance of a composer does not always go hand in hand with the quality of their work.

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.

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.

Music is not a profession. Music is a way of life - one that requires much professionalism.

No one can be an artist without a rich inner life.

Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead.

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'm one of the ones who believed the Iraq War was a complete mistake from the very beginning.

I think what history has done to Jewish people, frankly, cannot be made good by giving them a piece of land.

I am the conductor for life of the Staatskapelle in Berlin, which fills me with tremendous joy because I feel absolutely at one with them. When we play, I have a feeling that together we manage to create one collective lung for the whole orchestra so that everybody in the stage breathes the music in the same way.

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

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.

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

Music is an art that touches the depth of human existence; an art of sounds that crosses all borders.

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.

To play four hands requires two people who have great affinity for each other.

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.