Everything is Connected: The Power of Music
by Daniel Barenboim
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 216pp, £16.99 THE SUBJECT IS IMPOSSIBLE, AND he knows it, but that never stopped Daniel Barenboim: he goes on trying to write about
the very nature of music.
It's easy enough to say what you like and how you feel about it, easy to count the tempo or check the archives, but he wants more, much more than Busoni's lovely phrase about music being "sonorous air". He wants to show us musical thinking, the operation of a force that makes our bodies work whether we like it or not – you can't close your ears – and works in the brain very close to the areas that give us pleasure, pain and a reason to do things. He knows this is fundamental and he knows that we're inclined, in a very visual culture, to undervalue and misunderstand it.
In this new book he goes even further: he insists that music, its logic, its process, its impact "can teach us how to think". And that thinking, especially when it is applied to the travails of the Middle East, is intensely political. A symphony is not a treaty, an evening of Mozart does not guarantee social justice, and you couldn't very well sit an exam on the exact moral lessons of a Bach fugue; but the nature of making and thinking about music has everything to teach.
It's a natural notion for a great musician; David Beckham might say the same about ball games. Music is where Barenboim thinks, works and stars. So he has to show something rather tricky: that his claim about music's power, its ability to show that everything is connected, is more than the obvious fact that the same brain forms Barenboim's glorious Mozart and his firm opinions on how respect for Palestine could guarantee the safety of Israel.
He makes his own obstacles on the way. He has no time for the way some people read biography into music – claiming Chopin must have been a wishy-washy pianist because of his tuberculosis, or psychoanalysing Mahler post mortem just because his career overlapped Freud – but that undermines the single strongest reason for listening to his claims in the first place: the story of his own life.
It's a life worth telling. He gave his first concert aged seven, at 11 he was invited to play with the Berlin Philharmonic, he's conducted or played piano with every major orchestra in the world; and he ranges from the most filigree Mozart to thunderous Wagner and even has a wonderful ear for Elgar, a composer who still doesn't often get the thought he deserves.
He's a man who has lived several identities: grandchild of Jews who got away to Argentina, then an Israeli citizen, then a world traveller as a musician based in Chicago and also in Berlin. He's at once very serious about his Israeli identity, mourning the socialist past, regretting the moment when cheap Palestinian labour from the occupied territories turned an experiment in living into an ordinary capitalist economy; and very serious about the way in which Israel can't work without acknowledging Palestine. He carries an Israeli passport, but also a Palestinian one.
He was the creator, with his friend Edward Said, of the West-Eastern Divan, an orchestra for Arab and Israeli musicians playing together, once playing Wagner whose music was long taboo in Israel, once and memorably playing in Ramallah. He loves to show how making music makes people listen to each other, shows them common things (Russian music technique, mostly, as exiled Russians taught music round the whole Middle East); the stories are wonderfully moving, but they don't quite make an argument.
There are Israelis who reckon he's naive, perhaps dangerously so, in his talk of working for harmony and not just victory. Part of his answer is that it's just as naive to rely on military might, which hasn't produced a solution in 60 years; but he also knows very well why Israel matters. He's been addressed as "the Jew Barenboim" by a Berlin councillor, he remembers talk when he married the cellist Jacqueline du Pré that she had joined "the Jewish musical mafia". His answer: "The Jew of 1940 felt threatened; the Jew of today can think of his own land, of Israel."
This very personal tangle of thought and feeling, both very particular but also quite openly hoping for the universality of the great philosopher Spinoza, is hard to confine in words; what Barenboim writes is a series of true essays, attempts on a vast subject.
Some things you'd expect: he hates Muzak, is horrified when TV ads for a brand of loo unfold to a bit of Mozart's Requiem, which is quickly replaced with the Overture to Tannhäuser when the loo-makers read all the complaints. The only kind of blasphemy they can imagine, it seems, is against religious sentiment. They're perfectly happy to blaspheme against the power of music.
He hates Wagner productions which try to distract the eye from the very start when they should be helping an audience listen hard to what the music itself is saying, and promising. He points out, shrewdly, how western musicians wiped away the sarcasm and the irony in Shostakovich and left the music just the brilliant surface that Stalin wanted to show the world.
He calls the academic insistence on authenticity, using the historic number of old instruments at the "right" speed when playing Bach or Beethoven, a kind of fundamentalism; and he's right. "Musically correct" music is a nonsense. He knows Mozart rather liked having 21 violins for his symphony number 34 at Mannheim, not the "musically correct" seven or so. And anyone who owns the set of Beethoven's symphonies at a kind of wind-up speed, supposedly authentic and recently very fashionable, knows the substance disappears in a rapid, vapid clatter of notes.
If there's a single, powerful current in all this, it's the defence of harmony and its powers against those who are obsessed with tempo (and getting it "musically correct".) Barenboim glories in Furtwangler's answer when asked how on earth he decided on tempo since he'd never play Beethoven's Fifth at the same speed two nights running: "Depending on how it sounds," the Maestro said. First comes content, sound, shape; tempo is the last decision, in the process of performing.
And harmony is the heart of Barenboim's notion of what music has to teach. There is the balance of high emotion and rigorous thought in preparing a piece, and knowing something so securely you have room to improvise. He values the mutual dependency of different voices in western music, the way they work together; which gives him a problem he doesn't examine – since Arab music often requires musicians to play in unison, can it work the same wonders?
He also sees that common purpose doesn't rule out contrast and difference, even dissent. He sees the depth and also the lightness in Mozart (he is a perfectly wonderful interpreter of Mozart); you can't make a spiritual statement out of a fine jokey coda, or turn musical substance into pure froth, without losing the whole point. "There's no other composer," he says, "where each contour is so strongly defined by its opposite."
All this is wonderfully stimulating, but not necessarily right. For a start, this power of music to combine what's individual and what's collective may look better from the conductor's podium – music needs a subjective vision, Barenboim says, and often it's his. A second violin might differ.
Then again, a group playing Mozart has already agreed to play Mozart, even if they mean to play against him and win. How, with musical thinking, do you accommodate the desire to change things utterly, to play something quite different, or not to play at all? Isn't music, for all its wonders, necessarily confined by the rules of how it is made?
I ask because Barenboim insists, brilliantly, on the power of music, physical almost as much as mental, and some of his notions seem exactly right; now he's said it, I'll always see a nation's constitution as its score and politicians as the players. And his taste for scores and rules have never stopped him from making trouble.
He wanted to save the music of Wagner from the use Hitler made of it – Hitler abused Beethoven, too – and from Wagner's wretched anti-Semitic pamphleteering; to separate music from the associations other people insist it must always have. So he conducted Wagner for the first time in the state of Israel, a most surprising encore.
The music was taboo not least because of how it was used in some concentration camps: an accompaniment for the obscene procession to the gas chambers. Barenboim doesn't want to erase that memory: on the contrary, he wants active thought about it, about Wagner and his attitudes, about the Holocaust, about the process of acknowledging the Holocaust. And he thinks bravely: he wants Palestinians to know about the Jewish past but he thinks it is just as important that Palestinian culture, suffering and existence are visible to Israeli Jews.
This is a huge burden for music, but music is where Barenboim starts; and in his writings what he does best is convince you that music might just bear the burden well.
The full article contains 1575 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
