Zitat des Tages von 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.
Anti-Semitism has no historical, political and certainly no philosophical origins. Anti-Semitism is a disease.
US presidents can make all the commitments and declarations they want until they are blue in the face, in the Muslim world they will always be perceived as partisan.
We need to take music out of the ivory tower - both for musicians and for the public. Otherwise, classical music will not survive the 21st century.
Tradition demands that we not speak poorly of the dead.
Either you live by the barometer of the music critics, or you live by your own. I choose the latter.
When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique sense of peace.
Music is an art that touches the depth of human existence; an art of sounds that crosses all borders.
When you get to be 103, modernism is a very wide concept.
Beethoven was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was not interested in daily politics, but concerned with questions of moral behaviour and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting the entire society.
Sound is often talked about in a very subjective way, as if it had a colour. This is a bright sound, this is a dark sound. I don't believe in that because I think that is much too subjective.
Music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments of his life.
I think what history has done to Jewish people, frankly, cannot be made good by giving them a piece of land.
In the beginning, there was silence. And out of the silence came the sound. The sound is not here.
The tempo is the suitcase. If the suitcase is too small, everything is completely wrinkled. If the tempo is too fast, everything becomes so scrambled you can't understand it.
I maintain music is not here to make us forget about life. It's also here to teach us about life: the fact that everything starts and ends, the fact that every sound is in danger of disappearing, the fact that everything is connected - the fact that we live and we die.
'Tristan' is a very unique case, not just in Wagner's output, but in music in general. It remains contemporary no matter what else surrounds it. There is something self-renewing about it.
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.
When you love somebody and they die young and you are young, too, it is very hard.
I used to conduct the last opera in Berlin on Sunday, get on a plane on Monday to Chicago, and start a rehearsal that same night, if it was a performance week.
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.
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.
Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.
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.
Now the first step has to be taken, the step towards democracy. This step is full of risks, and requires trust on all sides. We don't know where it will lead. But if we just stand still, we will have no chance of escaping the violence.
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.
Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.
Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.
The historical importance of a composer does not always go hand in hand with the quality of their work.
I'm one of the ones who believed the Iraq War was a complete mistake from the very beginning.
I don't like possessions.
I get no satisfaction just showing myself in every corner of the world every week.
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.
I am convinced that 100 years from now, people will talk about Elliott Carter as one of the most important figures in the second half of 20th-century music.
You have to really have the will to hang onto the first note as it is being played, and then really stay with it and take the flight, as it were, you know, for the duration of the piece.
For many people, music is here to let them forget the daily chores of life.