CAterina Valente sang in 1956: “You are music that intoxicates me / Who listens to my heart in love.” That wasn’t aimed at the 13-year-old Barenboim, who was studying harmony and counterpoint with Nadia Boulanger in Paris at the same time, but it was fit pretty well. Because he too was and is music. Three years earlier, at a Salzburg piano recital, Wilhelm Furtwängler had described him as a “phenomenon”.
Today, Barenboim, at his old office, the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, has matured into a kind of second Furtwangler for exactly 30 years. To an eminence in music, to an authority in the field of German repertoire, to a world champion of tones. But unlike the legendary, somewhat shyly solipsistic conductor, the Argentinian-born Israeli, who also has Spanish and Palestinian nationality and speaks seven languages, has always been a watchful, committed, meddling world policeman of music. The sounds breathe, a tireless worker, diligent, restless, unstoppable.
Of course now. Shortly before his 80th birthday today, someone canceled his allegiance, slowed him down and said “no”: his own body. He sounded the alarm with skin cancer, broken intervertebral discs and finally with vasculitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels and checkmated Daniel Barenboim in view of the permanent overload for seven decades. No sound can be heard from him live today, he has to take it easy, all birthday concerts and tours have been canceled.
This is as sad as it is worrying. And of course everyone hopes for every possible improvement for the over-maestro of our time, small but hugely important, with a sense of mission and power. Because nobody would wish for such a spectacular career to be stopped so abruptly that suddenly a conductor’s stick is just hanging in the air, but the hand behind it is suddenly missing. Does Daniel Barenboim see this as a warning to really step back a little, to give up, to let others go first? The accomplished Strauss conductor never conducted the “Rosenkavalier”, but he will probably know the Marschallin’s sentence: “You have to be light: with a light heart and light hands, hold and take, hold and let.”
But how should one let go, whom life has given so richly? He grew up in a sheltered, cultivated post-war Buenos Aires. His parents, Russian Jews who had emigrated to Argentina, were his only teachers. Under the grand piano in the living room, another child prodigy became his best friend: Martha Argerich.
For more than ten years this relationship, which was broken off at some point, has been artistically intensified again. Double evenings of these two miracle animals, who intuitively interact with each other, are really always great moments of the company, white-haired, overpolitely letting the other go first, not only happens with Daniel Barenboim, as is so often the case, at a high level, but inspired music-making, giving and taking , letting yourself be carried away, floating above the ordinary. Like Philemon and Baucis, a well-known couple can be experienced here that doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone, least of all to themselves, that they immerse themselves completely and let themselves be carried away by a stream of notes that they seem to know how to steer spontaneously.
And then the old Daniel Barenboim magic is back. The one with which he enthralled the world in the fifties as a boy prodigy, and in the late sixties with his friends Zubin Mehta, Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman mixed up the classical music scene with glamor and temperament. This increased when in 1967 he married the cello’s it girl, the immensely popular, bohemian Jacqueline de Pré. People celebrated in Israel, made music against the Six Day War. The two were the golden couple of non-Woodstock culture.
Even back then, Daniel Barenboim was often to be found on the conductor’s podium. To this day, he has produced exciting Edward Elgar recordings, immersed himself in Mendelssohn’s “Lieder ohne Wort”, played Schubert with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, conducted the English Chamber Orchestra from the piano in a record cycle of all Mozart concerts that has been perfectly balanced to this day.
The 1980s were the age of excess for hectic touring jetsetters, and the new, attractive CD medium acted as an accelerator. But already in 1973 Jacqueline du Pré had to give up her career – she suffered from multiple sclerosis. In 1975 Barenboim became chief conductor of the Orchester de Paris and shifted the focus of his life to the Seine. From 1981 to 1999 he worked at the Bayreuth Festival, where he let his Wagner skills shine. But Jackie remained ill, he lived in Paris, soon with a second family, the Russian pianist Elena Bashkirova, the divorced wife Gidon Kremers, and the two sons David (now a DJ) and Michael (now a violinist). He did not remarry until 1988, a year after Jaqueline du Pré’s death.
Expulsion in Paris, stroke of luck for Berlin
Then came the stroke of luck of being expelled from the Paris Opera, because Daniel Barenboim found someone who was over him for the first time in their boss, the well-connected Yves Saint Laurent companion Pierre Bergé. A good day for him, of course, as well as for Berlin, where, parallel to his assumption of office with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1991, a year later he was the all-powerful artistic director of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, which the GDR kept small, and above all that of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Dresden Staatskapelle The Staatskapelle Berlin, which had been neglected as a foreign exchange bringer in the East Classical era, began to be polished to a shine.
Daniel Barenboim has ruled Berlin for three decades as the absolute sun king of high culture. Both Helmut Kohl and Angela Merkel gave the orchestra special bonuses, directors came and went at his behest and always remained footnotes. The repertoire had to follow his performance calendar, the Staatskapelle was allowed to perform even in the middle of the opera season, and there was never any cooperation with the other two operas. He got the expensive renovation of the house, he installed his Barenboim-Said-Akademie next door as a third music academy, not accessible to Germans, which is supported by the state. He initiated the privately financed Boulez Hall as an ideal chamber music venue, but ultimately he too decides who is allowed to perform in it.
From the music kindergarten (which also exists in Ramallah) to the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which is presented everywhere as a peace-building, interreligious flagship project at music festivals. Since its altruistic founding in 1999, it might well be worth shining a light on.
On the one hand, Daniel Barenboim was also enormously creative in these late Berlin years (after the end in Chicago in 2006, he also shouldered the music director post at the Milan Scala from 2007 to 2014), repeatedly conquering new, surprising repertoire from Massenet’s “Manon ‘ to Busoni’s ‘Bride’s Choice’ to Nicolai’s ‘Funny Women’. He cultivated his contemporary friendships with composers such as Boulez, Elliott Carter, the blunder Jens Joneleit and today Jörg Widmann. He has established himself as a committed critic of the state of Israel in its dealings with the Palestinians, and his friend Said showed him the way to becoming a political thinker. But the Berlin Philharmonic did not choose him as chief conductor three times, and he did not receive the Nobel Peace Prize either.
Like no other conductor of our time, he has prepared an enormous number of assistants: Antonio Pappano, Christian Thielemann, Simone Young, Philippe Jordan, Sebastian Weigle, Dan Ettinger, Thomas Guggeis; He put the finishing touches on Gustavo Dudamel and Omer Meir Wellber. At least he observed piano talents, and encouraged them when he liked them. He was not alone in building a wonderful ensemble of singers at the beginning of the State Opera and merging it with his own family of artists.
But in the meantime a lot has gotten old, the shine has faded, he himself is reviled as an authoritarian old man by musicians. And looking back, one wonders whether the Barenboim Treaty should not have been boldly allowed to expire in 2022 in order to finally dare the urgently needed new beginning to herald the post-Barenboim era; definitely with his continued strong presence at the Staatskapelle. Fate may have taken matters into its own hands.
Nevertheless, Berlin and the world can be infinitely grateful to Daniel Barenboim. For many hours of soulful music-making, for the experience of how a person fully immerses himself in his profession, as a creative artist in every fiber of his being the glamorous center of a brilliant sound universe. There is probably no one who understands music as easily and intuitively as Daniel Barenboim. And he has always generously shared this gift: “When I look back and forward, I am not only satisfied, I am deeply fulfilled,” he said recently. When he has rehearsed, is inspired, the beautiful moment is there that you want to hold on to forever. Then Daniel Barenboim was and is – music.