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. – 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. – Daniel Barenboim
I cannot be music director at La Scala and at Staatsoper. This would be unfair to one of the two institutions. – Daniel Barenboim
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. – Daniel Barenboim
Music is an art that touches the depth of human existence; an art of sounds that crosses all borders. – Daniel Barenboim
Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease. – Daniel Barenboim
Every concert I’ve finished with the knowledge I’ve played a fistful of wrong notes. – Daniel Barenboim
To have real knowledge, one must understand the essence of things and not only their manifestations. – Daniel Barenboim
I can’t stand going out to one more dinner with some Mrs. So-and-So who might leave a million dollars to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she dies. – Daniel Barenboim
In my mother’s belly, I remember not liking the tempi my father played the Beethoven Sonatas in. – Daniel Barenboim
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. – Daniel Barenboim
When I played my first concert with an orchestra, I was eight years old in Berlin. – Daniel Barenboim
I think that our civilisation is very much a visual civilisation – television and videos and all this. – Daniel Barenboim
I think Sharon is anti-Israeli because it’s in the interest of Israel to understand the problems of the other side. – Daniel Barenboim
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. – Daniel Barenboim
The greatness of a musician is measured by the degree of fanaticism he brings to his playing. – Daniel Barenboim
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. – Daniel Barenboim
Any conductor who tells you that if he is approached for the directorship of the Chicago Symphony that he’s not interested in it, you know perfectly well he’s lying. – Daniel Barenboim
You used to queue for three days and two nights for tickets for Rubinstein. People stayed in the queue for the whole day. – Daniel Barenboim
I liked very much when we lived in Hampstead. We would go for walks on the Heath. I liked it better than living in the centre of town. – Daniel Barenboim
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. – Daniel Barenboim
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. – Daniel Barenboim
The thing about Wagner is we’re always wrong about him, because he always embraces opposites. There are things in his operas which viewed one way are naturalistic, and viewed another way are symbolic, but the problem is you can’t represent both views on stage at once. – Daniel Barenboim
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. – Daniel Barenboim
I know so many Irish musicians. They’re all over, because there has been so much emigration from Ireland. Like the Jews. – Daniel Barenboim