It takes more than a global pandemic to stop Daniel Barenboim. The pianist and conductor is not merely one of the modern world’s pre-eminent musicians and public intellectuals. He is also one of those people who is temperamentally unable to let a crisis go to waste.
On the phone from Berlin, Barenboim admits the past few months have been a challenge. “I will have been making music in public for 70 years next month,” he says. “But in the last 60 I have never had so much time as now.” He has filled the gap by practising the piano at home, including a lot of works he has not played for decades. “I have enjoyed it tremendously,” he says.
Do not imagine that enforced seclusion means a protean figure like Barenboim has been whiling his time away at the keyboard until the lockdown comes to an end. All that piano practice has resulted in a new complete recording, due for release in the autumn, of the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas, which Barenboim first recorded in London in his 20s, more than half a century ago. And this week, he launches an ambitious streamed festival of new music, commissioned during the Covid-19 crisis.
“The idea of this festival would not have occurred without this pandemic,” Barenboim says. “The more I thought about its impact on music, the more I thought that what will suffer the most will be contemporary music. So I called 10 composers. I said to them there would be no money in this but, if they were willing to write a piece that will be ready by the end of June, that will last not less than five minutes but not more than 15, I could make a festival.”
That is what he has done. The festival Distance/Intimacy launches on 9 July and runs for four days. Curated by Barenboim and the flautist Emmanuel Pahud, it is being streamed each day at 5pm BST from the Pierre Boulez Saal, the 2017 Frank Gehry-designed hall in the centre of Berlin. The programmes consist of new works by heavyweight names in European contemporary music, including Luca Francesconi, Olga Neuwirth, Matthias Pintscher and Jörg Widmann. Each concert begins with Barenboim directing a work by the late Pierre Boulez, after whom the hall is named and whom Barenboim calls “the father of contemporary music”. After each programme, Barenboim and Pahud will discuss the arts and the crisis with the composers and other musicians. All fees have been waived.
“Everybody agreed with tremendous enthusiasm,” Barenboim says. “The only stipulations were that the pieces would be played in the Boulez Saal and that they would be for an ensemble of not more than 13 players because of distancing rules.” In fact only one of the composers, Irini Amargianaki, has written for the full ensemble.
“The music is not about the pandemic,” insists Barenboim. But he is emphatic that the festival and the concerts are umbilically linked to the times. “It is a declaration that we cannot just let go, that we must think about the future of music and the music of the future.”
These wider questions are very much on the minds of all musicians in all countries right now. Barenboim is no exception. “I wish I knew what the consequences will be,” he says. “Or, rather, I want to know and at the same time I don’t want to know. I share the philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s view. Intellectually, I am a pessimist because I know what I see around me and I don’t like it. But emotionally, I am an optimist because I believe we all want to live a full life.”
Even at 77, Barenboim chafes at the lockdown restrictions. “I am not a virologist. But I think a lot of the decisions are being taken by people who do not know any more than I do, which is nothing. In Berlin, the restaurants are filled to capacity. But at the same time an orchestra is not allowed to sit on the stage in the usual way and the audience is limited regardless of the size of the hall. This is absolutely inexplicable.”
A month ago, Barenboim led the Vienna Philharmonic’s first post-lockdown concert in the Austrian capital’s Musikverein. He wants to resume in Berlin, too. When I ask about the Berlin state opera, of which he is music director, he says: “If I thought I would never be able to conduct a live Ring cycle again, I can’t say what I would do.” He says that he has to believe that such things will be possible again. “I will conduct providing that it doesn’t put lives in danger. I am not afraid. I am not panicked. I am careful in all the ways I am told to be careful. I wear a mask when I go into a shop, but not when I play the piano.”
One of Barenboim’s sharpest regrets is the cancellation of a tour to Africa this month with his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra . His Arab-Israeli players were due to play in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Congo, Rwanda and Morocco. It would have been his first visit with an orchestra to sub-Saharan Africa. His wider frustration and anxiety about the current threats to music is impossible to miss. He says he has been worrying about this since long before the pandemic. “I don’t think it is overly pessimistic to say that, in a certain number of years, music will not be present in the way it has been present for so many hundreds of years.” He says we are “getting further and further away” from being societies that recognise the importance of music. “In this case, unfamiliarity seems to breed contempt,” he tells me.
He blames, above all, the decline of music education. But he is discouraged by the lack of political will to do much about it. This is even true in Germany and Austria. Angela Merkel’s love of music is “the great exception”, he says. He is intrigued by the new Labour leader, Keir Starmer. “I hear he plays piano,” he says with a laugh.
The interview has gone way over the allotted half-hour. I try a final political question. Does he have any more optimism about the Middle East than about the future of music? “How much time are you giving me to answer that one?” he laughs. “And how many pages of your newspaper?” But in the end he has an answer to this, too. “The question is how we get Israelis and Palestinians to accept the existence of the other. One day there has to be a young new politician in Israel and a young new politician in Palestine who can say: ‘Enough of all this, we must accept the existence of the other and make the best of it.’”
• Distance/Intimacy: A Festival of New Music runs from 9 to 12 July 2020 and will be available on ARTE Concert and YouTube.
