Two of the conversations in this book took place in front of audiences in New York and therefore have the character of trying to keep a large audience interested. The earliest was held at Columbia University’s Miller Theater in October 1995, as an event in an academic weekend conference about Richard Wagner. The idea was to take advantage of Daniel Barenboim’s brief presence in the city and to use it to draw him out in public about his many years of conducting Wagner in Bayreuth, Berlin, Chicago, Salzburg, and several other places. What added value to the conversation was that Daniel was the only musician participating in the conference, and therefore brought an essential and certainly a practical perspective to what would otherwise have been a purely academic occasion.
The other public dialogue we had five years later was arranged for and moderated by our mutual friend Ara Guze-limian, Artistic Advisor of Carnegie Hall, who brought us together on the stage of Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall during a break in a series of concerts by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra conducted by Daniel.
Partly because we had both enjoyed and benefited from our initial Wagner dialogue in 1995, we continued to meet in the intervening years and record a series of more conversations about music, culture, and politics during those rare periods when we were together for long enough in the same place. (All of these conversations took place before September 11.) At first we started our conversations by ourselves, with only a tape-recorder turning silently in the background. Although they were intermittent and took place both in New York and during August 1999 in Weimar, we found that a number of themes kept recurring that reflected our own professional interests, Daniel as a performing pianist and conductor, myself as a teacher and writer for whom music has been an important part of my life. We therefore had many more tapes than we ultimately used for this book, for the simple reason that repetition, hesitation, the sometimes slow process of exploring a new subject tentatively and painstakingly, as well as just long-windedness necessarily appeared in what we said to each other in the privacy of our company. There was no audience to capture or amuse. After all, we reasoned, as close friends with all sorts of overlapping concerns (not the least of them being the fact that each of us—Daniel the Israeli, myself the Palestinian—had his eye on the unfolding Oslo peace process, with different expectations and, in the beginning at least, with different perspectives), we were together exploring the parallels as well as the paradoxes of our lives saying, in effect, what’s wrong with doing it in our own unself-conscious way? Later, as the idea of publishing our conversations drew the attention of friends and editors, we thought it would be wonderful if we could persuade a mutual friend who knew a great deal about music and our part of the world to join us, so that we could give shape and discipline to the unfolding discussions.
Everything changed for the better when Ara Guzelimian joined us in December 2000. I was in the throes of treatment while also trying to continue with my teaching at Columbia, Daniel was performing all the Beethoven symphonies and concerti for piano (he was the soloist) with his German orchestra, the Berlin Staatskapelle, in Carnegie Hall. We found time on successive days to schedule several hours of discussion (sensitively and intuitively guided by Ara), much of it about Beethoven. I felt that it was a rare and wonderful thing to elicit reflections about music from a great musician at the very height of his powers during a week when he was traversing a major oeuvre (some would say the major oeuvre) of Western music. Being an informal and unpompous individual, Daniel responded generously to the needs of the discussion, which was fed all the time, I think, by the steady flow of Beethoven’s music, in all its drama, complexity, and intensity, that kept sounding in our collective ears in the background.
What the reader now holds in her/his hands has been culled from these lengthy and charged exchanges by Ara Guzelimian. It is therefore imperative that our remarks be read and understood not as ex cathedra musicological and aesthetic statements about music generally, Beethoven’s in particular, but rather as a record of the kind of concerns and subjects stimulated by hearing (Ara and myself) and performing (Daniel) most of Beethoven’s great orchestral and concerted works each evening for a week and a half.
About eight years ago I clearly remember asking Daniel, who had just finished conducting a blazing performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, whether the music continued sounding in his ears (as it did in mine) while we sat chatting over dinner after the performance. “In fact,” I added, “I can’t stop hearing that searingly romantic and audacious sound constantly: it’s almost driving me crazy.” “No,” he responded definitively, “I just cut it off, and now I am talking and having dinner with you.” And indeed that’s exactly what he seemed to be doing, even though for me the mystery of performance, memory, and extraordinary sustained sound gripped my attention for quite a long time. I wasn’t at all persuaded that for him Tristan had just ended, although of course we did have a coherent and rational conversation on subjects about as far from Tristan’s almost suffocatingly cloistral world as one could be. What I found myself doing in our sometimes bantering, sometimes very serious conversation, however, were two things: one, I was trying to understand what and how he had done what he had with Tristan, which I had just witnessed and could remember, even if I was trying to do so indirectly through conversation; and two, I was also trying to find analogies in my work that would help me better grasp his. I should say also that having been a serious amateur musician and pianist all of my life, this kind of protracted encounter, which turned into a great friendship for both of us, became a very rich thing.
I hope that the written and distilled record of some of our conversations here will prove enjoyable to the reader. In no way is what follows intended as an academic or professional contribution to discussions about the nature of art and life, or to the immense amount of gossip that already exists about the world of performers and the music business. Our hope is to provide our readers with an account of spontaneous face-to-face interactions between two active individuals who are close friends and have full and busy lives that intersect in all sorts of unexpected and, we think, illuminating ways. Our whole aim was to share our thoughts amiably and energetically with each other, and with others for whom music, culture, and politics today form a unique whole. What that whole is, I am happy to say, neither of us can fully state, but we ask our readers, our friends, to join us in trying to find out. After all, these are conversations not treatises, and it is the nature of conversation at its best to be engrossing for everyone involved, as well as from time to time to take even the speaker by surprise.
New York
March 2002