“You must meet my friend Edward Said!”
Daniel Barenboim was most emphatic about that. He and I had just had the first substantial conversation of our acquaintance, working on various aspects of a Carnegie Hall Perspectives project that explored his multifaceted musical interests and collaborations. With his boundless curiosity about everything around him, he began to pepper me with questions on my personal history. The moment he discovered my own Middle Eastern origins, he insisted on introducing me immediately to Edward Said.
The friendship between Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim dates back a decade earlier to a chance meeting in a London hotel lobby in the early 1990s and has blossomed into an extraordinary collaboration. A passion for music and ideas is surely the binding force, but there is also the powerful underlying pull of parallel personal geographies. Both men come from a complex overlapping of cultures.
Edward Said was born in Jerusalem into a Palestinian family, but grew up largely in Cairo, once removed already from his origins. As a member of a rather anglicized Christian Arab family living in a predominantly Muslim society he was arguably displaced once more. And he was displaced yet again to the United States where, as a teenager, he attended boarding school. Even his father’s history is geographically complex. Prior to Edward’s birth, Wadie Said had lived for a time in the United States, had attained American citizenship, and had even fought in the United States Army before returning to Palestine and Egypt. That peripatetic nature is readily found in many Middle Eastern family histories.
Daniel Barenboim’s background is just as complex. He was born into a Russian Jewish family that immigrated during his grandparents’ generation to Buenos Aires, where there was a thriving Jewish population, the third largest of any city in the world at the time. He subsequently immigrated with his parents to the newly created state of Israel, and his homes since that time have included London, Paris, Jerusalem, Chicago, and Berlin.
In each case, music was a formative and defining passion, fueled by recordings and the surprisingly rich musical life to be found in Cairo and Buenos Aires in the years following World War II. When Daniel Barenboim drew me into their friendship, it was partly in immediate recognition of striking parallels in my own background. I was born into an Armenian family in Cairo and many of my earliest memories are musical ones—my brother playing Bach Inventions for his piano lessons or the entire family going to a concert at the original Cairo Opera House (for which Verdi wrote Aida), where I remember seeing an ornate white piano reputed to have belonged to King Farouk. My parents attended some of the same memorable concerts and operas as the teenage Edward Said and, in fact, my mother remembers well the stationery store owned by Edward’s father.
Edward Said is now best known as an extraordinarily influential and innovative intellectual force, an astute commentator on literature and culture, on culture’s relationship to society, particularly in examining questions of Orientalism, a field of studies which he has pioneered. He is also a most forceful and impassioned commentator on the endlessly complex conflicts in the Middle East. But music still remains essential in his intellectual and personal life. He has written an enormous body of musical essays, and he remains an accomplished pianist.
As music director of both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Deutsche Staatsoper in Berlin, Daniel Barenboim is a central figure in the musical world. He is one of the most recorded artists in history, with a nearly fifty-year span of recordings dating back to his earliest discs made when he was in his teens. He has taken numerous highly public and courageous stands, becoming an outspoken advocate for the performance of Wagner’s music in Israel, fighting the lingering presence of anti-Semitism in Germany’s cultural politics, and becoming the first and most prominent Israeli musician ever to perform in the Palestinian West Bank (an invitation organized, not surprisingly, by Edward Said).
The Barenboim/Said friendship has had numerous fruitful public manifestations. In 1999, the two were central to a bold experiment in bringing together Israeli and Arab musicians to Weimar, Germany, as part of a celebration of the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth. That Weimar workshop has since been repeated both in Germany and in Chicago. Edward Said adapted and wrote a connective narrative for Daniel Bar-enboim’s concert performances in Chicago of Beethoven’s Fidelio, as well as the program essay for the subsequent Barenboim/Berlin recording of the opera. They have held nu- merous public dialogues on various musical topics, two of which were the starting point of this current book.
The conversations in this book took place over the span of five years. They are a selective and necessarily compressed distillation of an ongoing dialogue between two extraordinary creative minds.
My thanks go, first of all, to Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim for the enormous pleasure of their company, both in person and on paper. All three of us also owe a debt of gratitude to our editor, Shelley Wanger, for her encouragement, tempered with a discerning critical eye. Our thanks also to Patrick Sharpe for his meticulous transcription of hours of conversation, as well as to Professor David Freedberg and Francesca Nespoli of Columbia University’s Casa Italiana for providing a conducive setting for several of these conversations. Zaineb Istrabadi, Sandra Fahy, John Deverman, and Antje Werkmeister helped in countless ways, especially by keeping all of us in regular contact during the almost constant travels of Messrs. Said and Barenboim. Henry Fogel, Osvaldo Golijov, Alexa Nieschlag, and Matias Tarnopolsky all contributed helpful suggestions and corrections in various stages of the book. And finally, my enduring thanks to my wife, Jan, and to our son, Alec, for their love and their willingness to turn over our dining table to innumerable piles of annotated manuscript pages.
New York
February 6, 2002