Daniel Barenboim, the matchless Argentine-Israeli pianist (his two Mozart-concerto cycles remain references), conductor, activist (the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which he founded with the late Edward Said, bringing together Israeli and Palestinian musicians, is now in its seventeenth year), and general bon vivant (his taste for cigars led him to meet with a reporter at a cigar club opposite Carnegie Hall), came to town last week, for the sixtieth anniversary of his first appearance in New York City. Since he was only fourteen then, this dates him less than it might seem.
“Of course, I remember every moment of it,” he said, sipping pineapple juice in the cigar club. He had politely declined a smoke after contemplating the club’s menu, still lamentably short on Cubans. (“Itzhak Perlman,” he said, “used to buy Cubans in Toronto and bring them to me in his crutches.”)
“Twelve I was, and Stokowski”—the conductor Leopold Stokowski— “auditioned me in Paris. He always put on a voice, speaking bad English on purpose: ‘Would you like to play a concert Carnegie Hall, New York?’ And then he asked me what piece. I said, ‘Beethoven, No. 3.’ He said, ‘Good. You will play Prokofiev, No. 1.’ Goodbye.” Barenboim laughed. “Carnegie Hall had then—still does—the aura of a temple of symphonic music. It’s like La Scala, where some singers hate its acoustics. Actually, I’ve always thought that Carnegie Hall is absolutely wonderful for orchestra and not that good for piano; you cannot fill the hall with sound.”
He went on, “But I loved playing in public—still do. I had a wonderful time! And I was very prepared. Difficult piece—I’ve never played it since. And I had, forgive me for the lack of modesty, some kind of success. So I played an encore—the Bach chorale ‘Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.’ Stokowski was mad as hell. ‘You don’t play encores in my concerts!’ And then he didn’t talk to me for about twenty years.”
In the sixty years since, Barenboim has returned to New York many times, but his program at Carnegie this month is unusual: he is conducting a full cycle of the Bruckner symphonies, and conducting and performing several of the late Mozart piano concerti. “I believe that composers always have one genre that is their intimate diary,” he said. “Beethoven—it’s not the symphonies! It’s the piano sonatas and the string quartets. Mozart, for me, is the Da Ponte operas and the piano concerti, and there is a big link between those two, and I feel that every time I play them.”
There seems something fateful about the coincidence of Trump’s Inauguration and Barenboim’s playing the often melancholic late Mozart and the famously apocalyptic Bruckner. “I’m not a politician,” he said. “The East-Western is not an ‘orchestra for peace.’ It shows that if Palestinians and Israelis have equality of rights they have also equality of responsibilities, and this is why they can play so well together.
“But I have been thinking for a long time now about the fall of the Berlin Wall. The aftereffects were not all positive. I think the West committed many mistakes. Yes, the Communist system collapsed—it didn’t work. Yes! But the triumphalism of the West was so shortsighted.”
Describing his far-ranging musical travels, he said, “One day I might write a book about what I lived through between 1991 and 2006: four times a year, I would go from formerly Communist Germany and the Staatskapelle Berlin to Midwestern America—Chicago—and it was schizophrenic. I learned a lot. The attitude to culture, to knowledge, to education was actually far superior in the East than in the West. The musicians of the German orchestra understood democracy because they practiced it in their daily life, even under the Communist regime. They chose the musicians themselves; they appointed their conductor—they were far more independent than American orchestras. In Chicago, I had the feeling that everything that was achieved in America was achieved through legal means, not through human means. It was always the contract. Never human contact.”
After he completes the Bruckner cycle, Barenboim may turn to music previously left unplayed. “Someone asked me to play Rachmaninoff the other day. I thought, Really? But go listen to him play his music himself on YouTube. It’s nothing like what you expect. Really! Go listen to Rachmaninoff on YouTube!” ♦
