A couple of weeks ago I stood for a Prom concert for the first time for probably 10 years, to hear Daniel Barenboim conduct the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra that he founded with Edward Said. The orchestra is remarkable because it is made up of Israeli, Jordanian, Egyptian, Lebanese and Palestinian musicians. Barenboim himself is an Israeli of Russian descent. It’s easy to see why they capture the imagination of the media.
For all the positive nature of the project, I’m uncomfortable with the notion of music and politics mixing. No matter how positive an idea it is to bring Arabs and Jews together, I would prefer music to be free of such entanglements – if we’re to claim Wagner’s music is independent of his racist writings, should we not do the same across the board? I find it hard to decide where I stand. I was moved as these musicians gave the overture to Wagner’s Mastersingers as an encore, but immediately wondered if this wasn’t just sentimentality.
Barenboim’s book Everything is Connected is in part a repetition of some of the material from his BBC Reith lectures and Parellels and Paradoxes, which he co-authored with Edward Said (and which I reviewed last year). Here he spends quite bit of time trying to show how music can be used as a metaphor to resolve the crisis in the Middle East.
Barenboim acknowledges that he has been accused of political naiveté, but perhaps a refusal to play by the politicians’ rules is a good thing. What’s more worrying is the short section entitled ‘I Have a Dream‘, in which he fantasises about being the Israeli Prime Minister and resolving the crisis within 24 hours (it’s easy to see how the charge of naiveté might stick). In it, he says:
… the treaty will provide for the creation of a new domestic secret service, comprising both the army and the police. How about calling it the ‘Ministry for Peace’? A judge, not a soldier, will lead it … Whoever strikes out against peace, would be sentenced to five years in a kind of gulag. Even Palestinians would be sent here. A type of atonement that will ensure reformed behaviour.
I surely can’t be alone in finding this a deeply sinister vision. The Orwellian name he gives his new ministry! A gulag! (Can you imagine him saying ‘a kind of Reichssicherhauptsamt‘? – how is the Soviet Gulag any less repulsive than the Nazi’s camps?)
Can I have misunderstood this bizarre paragraph? I really don’t think I have. For all the positive nature of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and Barenboim’s gestures of solidarity with Palestinians, gestures that have led to calls for him to be stripped of his Israeli citizenship, the I Have a Dream section leaves me wondering if we should listen to Barenboim on this subject at all.
When the book concentrates on music it is fascinating, as one would expect from such a great musician and intellectual. I think he’s wrong to ridicule the ‘authentic’ music movement the way he does – if you want to hear how a great musician can learn from historically informed practice, I can wholeheartedly recommend Claudio Abbado’s recent Mozart recordings (and indeed his most recent cycle of the Beethoven symphonies).
I also think Barenboim is mistaken in many ways about Furtwängler, in particular in the way that he allows his great predecessor to have too great an influence on his performances. At the Proms, Barenboim’s admiration for Furtwängler was transparently evident in his reading of Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, and this was not a good thing in my view. The flexible tempi and wild abandon that Furtwängler brought to this music can’t be copied. Maybe I’m being unfair, but if you’ve never heard Furtwängler’s amazing Brahms 4th from Berlin in 1948 I urge you to do so immediately.
Having made these criticisms though, it is overwhelmingly a good thing that a great musician such as Barenboim can write so cogently about something he says cannot be explained. Music is a great and wonderful mystery, but it’s slightly less of a mystery when, for a moment, you’re in Barenbim’s head.
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