Quotes from Daniel Barenboim

More and more, we're used to taking things in through the eyes rather than through the ears, and opera is more of a spectacle.

The greatness of a musician is measured by the degree of fanaticism he brings to his playing.

I don't believe in changing the unchangeable.

For me personally, Elliott Carter was and remains one of the most meaningful composers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries because he represents substance. He was the living proof of uncompromising, complex music, which at first seems inaccessible. But it becomes accessible if one digs in and sees the development through.

I cannot be music director at La Scala and at Staatsoper. This would be unfair to one of the two institutions.

I was never really interested in an operatic post, but I took on the Bastille because it seemed a unique opportunity to build an opera ensemble from scratch, and to deal with all the disciplines that go into opera - the music, the staging and the singing - in an interrelated way.

Most of the time I spend looking for the 25th hour in the day, the ninth day in the week, the 32nd day in the month and the 367th, eighth or 70th day in the year because I feel I have a very rich life.

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.

Every note is a lifetime for itself.

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.

Every concert I've finished with the knowledge I've played a fistful of wrong notes.

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.

You have to really have the will to hang onto the first note as it is being played, and then really stay with it and take the flight, as it were, you know, for the duration of the piece.

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

Wer beruflich mit Musik zu tun hat, müsste dazu erzogen werden, Sinn dafür zu entwickeln, sich auch vielen anderen Wissensbereichen zuzuwenden, die nicht direkt mit Musik zu tun haben. Die technische Beherrschung eines Instruments, die für einen Berufsmusiker wesentlich ist, hat nur dann einen Sinn, wenn sie mit einem allgemeinen Erkenntnisprozess einhergeht, zu dem eine breite Basis von Wissen und Kultur gehören.

I don't think that we have any right to have a sort of generalized criticism, if not hatred, of the people who hated us, because then we only descend to the level of those people who persecuted us for so many years. New

And those who were against the regime felt that music was like a kind of oxygen, because this was the one place where they could really be free. And those musicians who were in favor of the regime were only too proud that such a wonderful institution existed under such a regime.

DB: Well, in a way, this is also the difference of the politician and the statesman, isn't it? A statesman is somebody with a vision. EWS: Somebody like Nehru or Mandela who has the vision and, at the same time, the capacity to carry it out, whatever that might involve … DB:

DB: You mean the Second Viennese School as refugees' music? EWS: Yes. Exiles' music—not only from the social world but also from the tonal world, if the tonal world by the time they inherit it is the accepted world, the world of habit and custom and a certain kind of solidity.

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.

You find Jews, Irish, and Italians in every orchestra.

When I played my first concert with an orchestra, I was eight years old in Berlin.

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

I believe education is much more important than we assume.