Explore Quotes by Daniel Barenboim

It is always interesting and sometimes even important to have intimate knowledge of a composer's life, but it is not essential in order to understand the composer's works.

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.

I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.

The Barenboim Foundation has nothing to do with politics.

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.

When we talk about music, we talk about our reaction to it. One person might say that music is so poetic, while another says it's all mathematics. Yet another might say it's about sensuality, and so on. That's all true. But music is not just one of these things. It's everything all at once.

Every note is a lifetime for itself.

When you love somebody and they die young and you are young, too, it is very hard.

For many people, music is here to let them forget the daily chores of life.

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.

Beethoven's music tends to move from chaos to order, as if order were an imperative of human existence.

I don't believe in changing the unchangeable.

Music is an art that touches the depth of human existence; an art of sounds that crosses all borders.

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.

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.

To play four hands requires two people who have great affinity for each other.

I have loved Elliott Carter's music for many years.

You used to queue for three days and two nights for tickets for Rubinstein. People stayed in the queue for the whole day.

Beethoven's importance in music has been principally defined by the revolutionary nature of his compositions. He freed music from hitherto prevailing conventions of harmony and structure.

I would like to be a terrorist for music education - to make a complete reform, all over the world.

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.