The Ethics of Aesthetics

Pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim (Buenos Aires, 1942) has always been a world citizen: born in Argentina to Russian-Jewish parents, raised in Israel, applauded on stages all over the world, he now lives in Berlin and carries Argentinian, Spanish, Israeli and Palestinian passports. Barenboim speaks many languages, but excels in the most universal one: music. As the British newspaper, The Times, once said of him, ‘Barenboim is one of the few musicians in the world who could accurately be described as legendary’.

Aged seven, he made his debut playing Beethoven sonatas, and at eleven, the child prodigy attracted the attention of Wilhelm Furtwängler, the great conductor. From the mid-1950s, Barenboim displayed his enormous talents as a pianist during numerous concert tours through Europe and the United States. He recorded all of the most important works in the piano repertoire, including complete piano sonata cycles of Mozart and Beethoven, piano concertos of Beethoven (with Otto Klemperer), Brahms (with John Barbirolli) and Bartók (with Pierre Boulez). His chamber music recordings also gained great renown, such as the cello sonatas of Beethoven and Brahms (together with Jacqueline Du Pré, the British cellist Barenboim was married to for twenty years, until her demise in 1987), the complete violin sonatas of Mozart (with Itzhak Perlman) and Schubert’s Trout Quintet (with Du Pré, Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman and Zubin Mehta).

At the age of twenty-five, Barenboim followed his second calling and became a conductor, first with the English Chamber Orchestra, then with the Orchestre de Paris, where he performed the work of contemporary composers such as Lutoslawski, Berio en Boulez. Between 1986 and 1989, Barenboim was artistic and musical director of the Opéra de la Bastille in Paris. In 1991, he was made conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (until 2006), and in 1992, artistic leader of the Berlin State Opera. La Scala in Milan named him First Guest Conductor in 2006; in 2010-2013, he will be performing Wagner’s entire Ring cycle there. Barenboim is also known and appreciated for his excursions into jazz and tango music, and still regularly conducts the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, and the Staatskapelle Berlin. He is generally considered one of the five greatest conductors the world has yet known.

In 1999, Palestinian-American cultural scholar Edward Said (who held the first Nexus Lecture, in 1994) and Daniel Barenboim jointly founded the West-East Divan Orchestra, which is composed of young, talented musicians from Israel and surrounding Arab countries. ‘This is an orchestra for peace. It is not going to bring about peace, but it can bring understanding, curiosity, and then perhaps the courage to listen to the other,’ the conductor said, who is a known defender of Palestinians’ rights. In 2003, Barenboim received a Grammy Award for his performance of Wagner’s Tannhäuser, and together with the Staatskapelle Berlin, he was awarded the Wilhelm Furtwängler Prize. His dedication to music and to society won Barenboim numerous other high distinctions, among which the Toleranz-Preis and the Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz (2002), the Wolf Prize in Arts, the ‘Israeli Nobel Prize’ (2004), as well as the Goethe Medal and the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal (2007) stand out.

Daniel Barenboim is praised by all for his attempts to draw young people to classical music. His ideas on music’s vital importance are exposed in books such as A Life in Music (1991), Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (2002, with Said), and Everything is Connected: The Power of Music (2008). In prestigious lecture cycles like the BBC Reith Lectures (2006) and the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on Poetry (Harvard University, 2007), he similarly bore witness to his unshakeable faith in the humanistic message that irradiates from art in general, and music in particular. In his Nexus Lecture, ‘The Ethics of Aesthetics’ - to be held on the 127th anniversary of Richard Wagner’s death, 13 February - Barenboim takes his lifelong search for the real meaning of music to new heights: what is the true imperative of beauty?