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Bring Music, Bring Life

Daniel Barenboim
Index on Censorship 2010 39: 11
DOI: 10.1177/0306422010381042

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BRING MUSIC,
BRING LIFE

Daniel Barenboim tells Clemency Burton-Hill why

music provides a model for living and governments
continue to fear the power of its influence

In 2001, the celebrated pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim was accused
of ‘cultural rape’ and branded a ‘fascist’ in Israel for conducting the work
of Richard Wagner as the second encore during a concert in Jerusalem. A
40-minute chat with the audience had preceded the performance of the
piece – the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde – during which
time Barenboim had asked if the audience would like to hear it, and invited
anyone who felt uncomfortable to leave. Around 2 per cent of the audience
left; those who remained gave Barenboim and his orchestra, the Berlin
Staatskapelle, a standing ovation. Wagner’s music has been censored, unof-
ficially, in Israel since 1938.
In recent years, Barenboim has become increasingly vocal on non-musical
issues, especially the Arab-Israeli conflict. He holds Israeli citizenship. In 1999,
together with his close friend, the late Palestinian academic Edward Said,
Barenboim founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, an ensemble of more
than 120 young musicians who hail from the Middle East – Israel, Palestine,
Lebanon, Syria, Jordan – and other Muslim countries including Egypt, Iran
and Turkey. Each summer, the orchestra comes together in Seville, where its

Daniel Barenboim conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

New Year’s Concert, 2009
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members are issued with Spanish diplomatic passports allowing them free-
dom of movement, before launching an international tour. The orchestra is not
able to perform in most of the countries represented by its members, but has
enjoyed phenomenal critical acclaim elsewhere in the world.
Barenboim was born in Argentina in 1942 to Russian-Jewish parents.
He gave his first piano recital in Buenos Aires aged just seven, moved
with his family to Israel aged ten, and was being described by conductor
Wilhelm Furtwängler as a ‘phenomenon’ by the time he was 11. The former
music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Barenboim was named
Conductor for Life at the Berlin Staatsoper in 2000 and Maestro Scaligero at
La Scala, Milan, in 2006. The recipient of numerous awards for his conduct-
ing, piano recordings and human rights work, he is also the author of three
books: A Life In Music, Parallels and Paradoxes (with Edward W Said), and
Everything Is Connected, in which he outlines his belief that music offers us
a unique model for understanding human relations and the world.
Clemency Burton-Hill, the granddaughter of a Jew from Belarus, is a
British writer, broadcaster and violinist who has been involved with music
projects in the West Bank and occupied Palestinian territories since 2004,
including the al Kamandjati refugee camp music schools in Ramallah and
Jenin. In January 2009, she was invited by Daniel Barenboim to join the
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra as an honorary violinist on their tenth anni-
versary tour. She has also interviewed Barenboim on a number of occasions
in print and on television, including the Proms, the BBC’s Culture Show, and
the Berlin Philharmonic’s 2010 Europa Konzert, which will be broadcast on
BBC4 later this year.

Clemency Burton-Hill: One of my strongest memories of rehearsing with you

and the West-Eastern Divan is a moment when you reminded the members
of the orchestra that every single one of their governments would stop them
from being there if they could, and that what they were doing was therefore
very brave. For all the adulation and acclaim that the Divan garners around
the world, it strikes me that it is, essentially, a censored orchestra.

Daniel Barenboim: Yes, you’re probably right. The Divan is not acceptable to
any of the countries represented by its members. We can’t play in any Arab
countries except the Emirates, nor in Israel. The Israelis don’t understand
why it is even necessary to make the gesture. And the Arab world mostly
sees the Divan as a way of normalisation, in the sense of accepting Israel,
and all the problems that involves.

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 bring music, bring life

Clemency Burton-Hill: So the fact that those kids come together to make
music with each other every year, in the face of governments who would
silence them and despite recriminations from their friends and family at
home, feels like something of a defiant act.

Daniel Barenboim: It is. And you know, I believe more and more that it is up
to individuals – or minorities – to express things which are not acceptable
to the majority. Because there is always a special angle that an individual or
a minority can have. And maybe the majority will eventually follow, but you
cannot start a new idea that is going to change things with the blessing of
the majority.

Clemency Burton-Hill: How important is it that the orchestra be allowed to

make music freely in the Middle East?

Daniel Barenboim: I think the full dimensions of the Divan will only be
achieved when we are able to play in Tel Aviv, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo,
because that is really what it is all about. On the other hand, if the conflict
was resolved there would hardly be a need for the Divan. And so it is a bit
of a contradiction in terms. The Divan came into existence and continues
to develop because of the conflict, and it has not yet been fully able to push
through its idea of accepting the narrative of the other, the point of view of
the other. For that you need a yearning voice for justice and for compassion,
from both sides. And the Israelis as a majority I don’t think have a compas-
sion for the rights of the Palestinians, otherwise they wouldn’t be occupying
the territories for so many years and they wouldn’t blockade Gaza.

Clemency Burton-Hill: You have said that ‘Our challenge in the 21st century
is to use music not only as an escape from life – in the sense that you come
home fed up, put on music, and forget your troubles – but also as a way of
making sense of the world. Music is not an alternative to living; it’s a model
for living.’ So when music is censored, or silenced, is there much more at
stake than merely entertainment and pleasure?

Daniel Barenboim: Yes, of course. I think history has shown us that many
people are afraid of the effect of music. It can be very exalting, it brings peo-
ple to expressions of solidarity and of enthusiasm – which is not always the
case with the government. That is why music was used and manipulated so
unashamedly by dictatorships. By the Nazis, by the Soviets ...

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Clemency Burton-Hill: And, ironically, those governments that manipu-

late music for their own purposes are often the states that censor it most
cynically.

Daniel Barenboim: Because music is very powerful. It is very difficult to

remain unmoved by music, I think probably for the simple fact that it has a
physical penetration through the ear, which is much stronger than through
the eye. If I don’t like what I am seeing, I can close my eyes. But if I don’t
like what I am hearing, I cannot close my ears; I mean, I can, artificially, I can
put my fingers in my ears, but basically there is a penetration, a physical
penetration, which makes it very powerful indeed.

Clemency Burton-Hill: I have heard you say there is something ‘subversive’

about music.

Daniel Barenboim: Edward Said always used to say that music is subversive.
When you have a beautiful melody played by a woodwind instrument, very
often the accompaniment, say, in the strings, will subvert that. Yet at the
same time, the full expression of the line will be totally dependent on it too.
There are many, many lessons to be learned from that.

Clemency Burton-Hill: Is it possible to describe why music is so powerful,

why it acts on us the way it does?

Daniel Barenboim: Well, I think music is so powerful because it is, first of all,
a physical thing, a physical expression of the human soul; something that is
not only in the thought. And it attacks, I would say, all the functions of the
human being. It attacks the brain, and it attacks the heart, and it attacks the
stomach, you know, the temperament. Each one of us reacts perhaps with
one more than any other of those three elements, but all three are constantly
in action, and that’s what makes it so dangerous. Music is much more pow-
erful than words.

Clemency Burton-Hill: Which is why censorship of music has always existed,

and still exists?

Daniel Barenboim: Yes. By the way, there is a wonderful book called Beethoven
in German Politics [by David B. Dennis]. It documents how Bismarck, Hitler,
and then in the East German Republic, how Beethoven was used for their

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 bring music, bring life

purposes, and how Hitler managed to convince the world that Beethoven’s
Ninth was the perfect example of German spirituality with a text that says
‘all men are brothers – except a few’, namely the Jews.

Clemency Burton-Hill: That brings us to an important point about the de

facto censorship of Wagner in Israel. You have always been adamant that
Wagner was originally banned after Kristallnacht in 1938 not because of his
own anti-Semitism – which had been well known since the 19th century
– but because of the anti-Semitism of the Nazi party, i.e. the monstrous
and appalling uses to which Hitler put the music. That distinction seems
still not to be being made in Israel today, where the ban is very much still
in place.

Daniel Barenboim: I’m afraid Israeli public opinion has manipulated all
that. I’m sure there are many people in Israel who ‘don’t want to hear
Wagner’ who think that Wagner was around in 1940 – that Wagner was
a Nazi. But you know, none other than [Arturo] Toscanini – who besides
being a great musician was a great fighter for liberty – in 1936, when he
was conducting the opening concerts for the new symphony orchestra in
Tel Aviv, ironically then called the Palestine Philharmonic, played Wagner
and there was no problem. The decision to stop playing Wagner was taken
by members of the orchestra after Kristallnacht and that was perfectly
understandable and just, from my point of view, in 1938. But to continue
with that now is arguably as bad as it would have been to continue to play
Wagner from that day.

Clemency Burton-Hill: It seems ironic that you were accused of being a fas-
cist for playing Wagner’s music, when it could be argued that censorship of
any music in a democratic country is verging on the fascist.

Daniel Barenboim: As I have said before, the idea this was a scandal was
started the following day by people with a political agenda, not those in the
concert hall, which greatly saddened me. I have always said that I respect
anybody’s right not to listen to Wagner and that is why his work should be
offered to a non-subscription audience. Israel is a democratic society, there
should be no place for such taboos.

Clemency Burton-Hill: Have you ever had any problems from members of the
West-Eastern Divan who perhaps did not want to play Wagner?

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Daniel Barenboim: No, in fact it was the Israeli members who asked me to
play Wagner in the first place, in 2004 or 2005. It was the brass players, who
came and asked me to programme some Wagner because they couldn’t play
it in Israel, they could not hear it in Israel, but they felt that musically it was
very important to them, and they had no problem with it.

Clemency Burton-Hill: How depressing is it, to you, that it is now almost

a decade since you played that Wagner encore in Jerusalem, and yet the
debate about whether his music should still be banned from live performance
seems not to have moved forward at all – rather backwards?

Daniel Barenboim: Yes, but the whole of Israeli society, from my point of view,
has humanly moved backwards over those ten years.

Clemency Burton-Hill: You have made an explicit connection between this

issue and Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians and the conflict today,
suggesting that the Wagner ban means Israelis have not yet made the tran-
sition into being Israeli Jews and are still identifying themselves with the
Judaism of the 30s and 40s. You have said: ‘Until we are able to do that, we
will not be able to establish a fruitful dialogue with non-Jews’ and pointed
out that while a sense of history is imperative, Israel must also look forward.

Daniel Barenboim: Yes, well, it is the same instinct that would allow so many
Israelis to deny the Palestinians who live in Israel, the so-called Israeli Arabs,
their human rights; to not allow civil marriages; the same instinct that means
there is no separation of the synagogue and government, which is some-
thing that is accepted in most of the world. The other place where it is not
accepted is Iran!

Clemency Burton-Hill: Talking about Iran, the authorities there have banned
all teaching of all musical instruments in all schools because ‘the use of musi-
cal instruments is against the principles of our value system’, according to
Education Minister Ali Bagherzadeh. Any school in Iran that teaches music may
now be permanently closed and its director barred. What do you think of that?

Daniel Barenboim: Well, one has to say that music has not played the role in
the Muslim world that it has played in Europe for centuries, so in a way they
are sadly more ignorant about the nature of what music is. For them, music
is something to celebrate with at weddings and mourn with at funerals, but

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 bring music, bring life

they don’t view it as an expression of the human quality of life. They don’t
understand that when you play a piece of music, whether it is a Chopin
Nocturne or a huge Bruckner Symphony, that this is the story of human life,
it tells us something of the quality of humanity. This is what makes us moved
when we listen to music.

Clemency Burton-Hill: The West-Eastern Divan contains some young Iranian

musicians within its ranks. How do you find their attitudes?

Daniel Barenboim: Those youngsters obviously do not share the opinions of

their government about the nature of music. As you know, they are wonder-
ful musicians, they have a huge capacity of giving, of generosity.

Clemency Burton-Hill: And I don’t think it’s too idealistic to suggest that their
experiences making music, especially in the West-Eastern Divan, have prob-
ably nourished and developed that capacity. The orchestra is what brings
them together with Israelis and Arabs, but music leads these youngsters to
all sorts of other connections – they talk about politics, football, pop music,
films; they fall in and out of love with each other; they begin to understand
and accept the narrative of the other and take what they have learned back
home. Isn’t it a tragedy that young Iranians will henceforth be denied the
right to even learn a musical instrument? To my mind that’s a particularly
pernicious form of music censorship; silencing it before it even exists!

Daniel Barenboim: In the end, though, when people forbid things, it is because
they are afraid of them. It is not a sign of strength, it is a sign of weakness.

Clemency Burton-Hill: Yes – I have been struck by that often, travelling

through the occupied territories with musicians. I have watched Israeli sol-
diers turn away young Palestinian musicians and singers at checkpoints as
if somehow playing Bach or singing Puccini were a genuine threat to the
state of Israel. And it always smacks of such monumental cowardice, even if
the soldier is wielding a gun. Especially when the soldier is wielding a gun.

Daniel Barenboim: Exactly.

Clemency Burton-Hill: And whoever it was who burned down the al

Kamandjati music centre in Jenin, or destroyed the Gaza music school;
such acts feel like a despicable yet rather pathetic attempt to silence the

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17
Gaza music school, Gaza City, Palestine, 14 October 2008. It was destroyed during
the Israeli bombardment in January 2009
Credit: Fady Adwan/ABACA USA/Empics Entertainment

Palestinian’s fledgling right to express themselves, through music, as a peo-

ple. As Ramzi Aburedwan [founder of the al Kamandjati music school and
viola player in the West-Eastern Divan] always says: ‘Bring music, and you
bring life.’

Daniel Barenboim: Of course. You know, earlier this year, in May, I had organ-
ised an orchestra only of European musicians – no Israelis, no Arabs – to
play a concert in Gaza. Simply to give people a little bit of relief from the
harshness of their lives. And in the end the Israeli government did not allow
it to happen, because they would have had to open the border to me and 35
musicians, once in the morning to let us in, once in the afternoon to let us
out. We would have been there simply to make music; there was no ques-
tion of anything else. But they forbade it. I found it absolutely devastating,
I have to say.

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 bring music, bring life

Clemency Burton-Hill: What would you have played?

Daniel Barenboim: We would have played Mozart.

Clemency Burton-Hill: And if an Israeli politician had the vision to think

about this differently, to say: we are a democracy, we support human rights,
the inalienable human right to self-expression, we must let international
musicians come here and make music freely …

Daniel Barenboim: A politician like that would not be elected in Israel.

Clemency Burton-Hill: But these are the moments, as you say, when Israel
can define itself as a democracy. How can it get away with silencing some-
thing as innocuous and humane as a simple concert of Mozart in Gaza?

Daniel Barenboim: I have no idea. I have no idea. It defies every logic. Every
logic. From our Jewish history we should be the first ones to know the impor-
tance of compassion and not to do unto others what was done unto us for
so many centuries.

Clemency Burton-Hill: Where does it all end?

Daniel Barenboim: I don’t know. I don’t know. I really cannot answer that.

© Clemency Burton-Hill
39(3): 10/19
DOI: 10.1177/0306422010381042
www.indexoncensorship.org

For more information visit www.west-eastern-divan.org and www.danielbarenboim.com

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