[Reader-list] Interview: Edward Said & Daniel Barenboim

[Harsh Kapoor]

The Guardian
Saturday April 5, 2003
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,3605,928709,00.html

In harmony

Daniel Barenboim is an Israeli and a world-famous conductor, Edward 
Said a Palestinian, renowned advocate of his people and a professor 
of literature. They tell Suzie Mackenzie about their unlikely 
friendship and their shared passion - music

"Separation has no future": Daniel Barenboim (top) and Edward Said. Photo: AP

 It was some time in the mid-1990s, the conductor and pianist Daniel 
Barenboim says - "1994, 1995, I don't remember, anyway it doesn't 
matter" - but roughly a year or so after a chance meeting in a London 
hotel with Edward Said, the Palestinian writer and professor of 
literature at Columbia University, that he took the decision, "as a 
Jew and an Israeli citizen", to go to the West Bank to see for 
himself the plight of the Palestinians.

He had been privately critical for more than two decades of Israel's 
policy towards the Palestinians, "ever since Golda Meir's 
pronouncement in 1970 that there is no such thing as a Palestinian 
people. I thought then, you can't say this, you can't turn a blind 
eye, say they don't exist."

He didn't want to go, he says, out of some spirit of empathy or 
compassion, but because the situation struck him as unjust. "That 
even though the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was an act of 
universal justice, it has to be recognised that it has been achieved 
at the price of displacement, grief and tragedy for others. We had 
been unable to see this then, in 1948. But it has become an absolute 
necessity for us to see it now."

Justice, he says, "strong ethics", is the basis of Jewish history, 
"as opposed to love which is the Christian tradition". And it was in 
this Jewish tradition that he went first and later returned twice - 
in 1999, and then again in 2002, to play a concert in Ramallah which 
resulted in death threats to himself and a headline in the Jerusalem 
Post, "With friends like Barenboim, who needs enemies?" So, as an 
outspoken critic of Israeli occupation of the West Bank ("It is wrong 
physically and morally - a corrupting influence, not just in the 
territories but back home"), Barenboim became vilified, "only by 
some", he points out, as an enemy to the land he loves.

Is this a definition of friendship? Does true friendship consist only 
in a sort of appeasement, as the Jerusalem Post implies, saying the 
right thing at the right time, a refusal to give offence? And is this 
"friendship" any better than the kind of friendship that exists only 
in adversity, cheering yourself up with empathy, going to Palestine, 
for example, to exhibit pity for the Palestinians - an emotional 
tourism? Barenboim went to play music, and before an audience who, he 
was well aware, might consider him the enemy. According to this 
definition, which is his, friendship on the side of justice will 
always carry with it a risk.

There are two sorts of people in the world, Barenboim says - and you 
can't but like him for this: "Those who like to converse only with 
those who agree with them, who get a sense of comfort from that. And 
others who are curious to hear a different point of view." It is one 
of the reasons he loves conducting. "Because in an orchestra you will 
have a number of great players, each of whom is creative and each 
with clear ideas of his own." In this sense, he says, an orchestra is 
a model of democracy, "because you have to leave space for others and 
therefore have no inhibitions about claiming a place for yourself".

In Ramallah, Barenboim claimed a place for himself on the side of 
justice, though he couldn't be sure of the Palestinian response. "It 
occurred to me that, for the first time in my life, I might have to 
face an audience that was unfriendly." He was almost afraid. But 
fear, as he says, is always a lack of knowledge. "It is lack of 
knowledge that brings instability, so it is important to know not 
only how to do something but why you are doing something. It is the 
same with music." They gave him a standing ovation which he likes to 
think is as much because he is an Israeli "who stretched out his 
hand", as that he is a world-famous musician. Or maybe a mix of both. 
"Usually the only Israeli they see is an Israeli soldier."

It was the same, Said says, a few years before when Barenboim gave a 
concert in Jerusalem. "I was there with him and the night before we 
had been to dinner at the home of a woman friend on the West Bank 
whose husband had just been deported." At the end of the concert, 
Barenboim thanked her for a wonderful evening, delicious food, 
denounced the deportation and dedicated his first encore to her. It 
was an extremely generous act, Said says. "And in this Daniel is 
quite unique in the music world. He likes to be engaged with the 
audience. Compared with someone like Brendel, who is more detached, 
aloof, Daniel is talkative."

Gladness not sadness is talkative, the German philosopher Hannah 
Arendt has written. "And truly human dialogue differs from mere talk, 
in that it is entirely permeated by pleasure in the other person and 
what he says. It is tuned to the key of gladness." It is a wonderful 
idea this and it is the idea, the starting point, I think, for the 
book of dialogues, Parallels & Paradoxes, that Barenboim and Said 
have just published, conversations that took place over a period of 
five years, which they recorded, and based around the subject that 
for both is a source of gladness - music.

What is striking about these two friends, Said and Barenboim, two men 
from radically different backgrounds, yes, but both intellectuals and 
sharing a common history - their relationship to the Holy Land - is 
how different they are. Not because one is an Israeli, one a 
Palestinian - they are, as individuals, temperamentally opposed: one, 
easy, expansive, the other, Said, more cautious, despite his 
outspokenness.

Barenboim opens the door to his vast Claridge's suite - grand piano 
dwarfed in one corner, buckets of flowers - a napkin tucked into his 
shirt. He makes a sweeping gesture with his hand, "It's all rather 
grand, I'm afraid" - without sounding in the least bit contrite - and 
proceeds with his breakfast, a bowl of porridge. He is glad I have 
ordered tea, he adds, because with tea will come biscuits. Two things 
make him nervous, not eating and not sleeping. So he eats punctually 
and naps every afternoon.

Music has been his life since memory began. "There was music before I 
could speak, both my parents were piano teachers, we were not rich." 
And as a child, when someone came to their apartment, in Buenos Aires 
where he was born in 1942, "they came to have a piano lesson, so I 
thought the whole world played the piano. I never met anyone who 
didn't play the piano."

He was an only child and a brilliant child, "though the brilliance 
has gone, only the child remains", and he gave his first official 
concert at the age of seven. He has been performing all his life and 
his manner of speaking, half arrogance/authority, half 
self-deprecation/not too much authority - in elegant phrases that 
seem to spring fully formed from his lips - gives him a kind of 
comedic confidence. He is funny without you ever being certain that 
he means to be. He expects to be listened to and, though he denies 
it, he expects to be liked. "As a conductor, you have to give up any 
hope of being liked."

Does he think that being an only child, the focus of attention, 
knowing somehow always who he was, has made him self-absorbed? "I 
don't think so. It depends how you define it. There are people who 
see only themselves. But being self-absorbed can also mean that 
whatever you see, hear, experience, you find something for yourself 
in it. In other words, you relate everything to yourself and yourself 
to everything. And that I am." Being with him, it is impossible to 
relax. Every 10 minutes, he tells me he will have to leave in five 
minutes, so I find myself suspended between maximum tension, maximum 
concentration. This he does for an hour and a half.

And, of course, he is passionate. When asked why he felt the need to 
make a stand - why go to Ramallah? Why draw so much fire? - he 
replies, "What do you think music is about? Five hundred years ago, a 
thousand years ago, people loved, hated, were jealous. We didn't 
invent human nature. How do you expect me to sit at home and just be 
a musician? That wouldn't be playing music. That would just be 
playing a selection of notes."

Music, he says, is a metaphor for life, "in the sense that music is 
in a constant state of becoming, it is making connections, between 
sounds, with things that are ephemeral." All of history, and all of 
his history, has been a demonstration of this. When he emigrated to 
Israel from Argentina in 1952, at the age of 10, Israel itself was in 
a state of becoming. "It was a socialist state in the best sense of 
the word socialist. The great problem with socialism is that you are 
made to feel that you work only for the state, not for the 
individual. But if there is no state and you are working towards it, 
then socialism has a totally different feel."

It is from here, he says, that his idea, his instinct for the 
connection between the individual and the collective was forged. And 
conducting, as he says, is the apotheosis of this. "Any professional 
conductor can make a professional orchestra play the way he wants 
them to play. But that's not music. Music is when the conductor and 
the orchestra breathe as from one collective lung."

It's probably fair to add at this point that Barenboim, for all his 
imperious confidence, is not a bully - his entire manner is the 
antithesis of coercion. You learn this as a parent, he says - he is 
the father of two sons. He worries about them and he knows you can't 
get it right as a parent. "I always believe you either treat them too 
long as babies or too soon as adults, you can't find the right moment 
because there is no right moment. And on the whole I would rather err 
on the side of treating them too soon as adults. That has some 
positive results, some negative."

It is all about balance, he says. And balance, he could have added, 
is a definition of friendship. Different notes played with one accord 
- harmony. Which is why he calls Said his friend. "Edward and I have 
different narratives, so our interpretation of the past is different. 
But of the present we are more or less in concord. And our 
interpretation of the future, for Israel/Palestine, is in essence the 
same. That there must be a way to live side by side, each in his own 
country but with open contact. Separation has no future."

Barenboim, as an Israeli, is situated on the side of power. He says, 
"We Jews, when we speak about the other, have to understand we are 
talking about those who depend on us, whose territory we have 
occupied." Said speaks on behalf of the dispossessed - 
characteristically a less negotiable position. Said is more dissonant 
than his friend, less at ease with himself, not less talkative, but 
more wary with words. Not surprising, perhaps, in a professor of 
literature aware of the weaponry of language.

We meet in his publisher's offices in London where he accepts a cup 
of coffee in a plastic mug - though he'd rather have water, he 
prefers not to ask. He looks quite tired, he sleeps little, "three 
hours a night". Barenboim has described him as "the ultimate 
Renaissance man" - a scholar, an accomplished pianist. Until his 20s, 
Said had the hope that he might become a professional musician - "In 
the end I wasn't good enough." And he is, of course, the most 
passionate, articulate and, in the west, most visible advocate of the 
Palestinian people.

Unlike Barenboim, who seems to have sprung fully formed into his 
world, it took Said almost 40 years to find his authentic voice, "my 
second self". It wasn't until 1973, soon after the Yom Kippur war, 
that he wrote his first political article for the New York Times. And 
you sense in him the diffidence of a man who has constructed himself 
from the outside.

For the past 10 years he has added to "his struggle" the battle 
against cancer - he was diagnosed with leukaemia in 1991, began 
treatment in 1994 and has been under constant medical supervision 
ever since. He indicates a large bulge where his stomach is and asks 
if he looks fat - as a child, his father used to tease him about his 
physique. The lump is a tumour, a metastasis from the leukaemia.

The cancer, he says, has changed him: "Of course. In the sense that 
you appreciate every day more." And he now finds it hard to travel 
long distances. "I couldn't, for example, go to Palestine. I always 
think of going back but I am too ill."

But he can lecture and he can teach and he believes not arrogantly 
but sincerely in the usefulness of this. That in the public realm 
there is a place "for the not standard voice, for the alternative 
voice. I am that and always have been."

Three things converged in Said's life in the early 90s. His illness, 
his meeting with Barenboim and his return to Palestine in 1992 for 
the first time since he had left in 1947. In 1994 he started work on 
his memoir, Out Of Place, an attempt to recuperate the "first self" 
he had left behind and to try to understand the confusion, 
inconsistencies and multiple contradictions that went into making his 
character.

He was born in Jerusalem in 1935 into a wealthy, cultivated family - 
his father was the owner of a stationery company with franchises in 
Palestine and Cairo. He spent much of his youth in Egypt, attending 
British colonial schools. He always wanted to be a good son, yet from 
an early age, from his father to his teachers, all authority figures 
rebuked him. He writes touchingly about how his rebel sensitivity was 
formed. His father was a bully and his mother sometimes smothering, 
sometimes cold. Even his cleverness didn't please them.

"Why do you insist on doing so badly?" his mother would ask him. 
Disgrace, fear, punishment seem to have been the template of his 
childhood and when he went to America in 1951, as a freshman to 
Princeton and then a graduate at Harvard, he has said he made a 
conscious decision to leave the past behind.

There is a poignancy in this friendship between Said and Barenboim - 
that within a few years of Said's family leaving Jerusalem for good, 
in 1947, Barenboim's family was moving in. Two opposing trajectories, 
one going home, one being expelled from home. But unlike Barenboim, 
Said didn't come from a safe place, an open world that inspired 
openness - that was music, his parents, the piano. And more 
significantly perhaps, he didn't come from trust.

Barenboim describes in his autobiography how, when in 1954 he was 
asked by the conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler to play with the Berlin 
Philharmonic, his father said no. It was too soon after the war for a 
Jewish boy to travel from Israel to Germany. And Barenboim had no 
problem with this. In a parallel story at the end of his memoir, Said 
tells how he was betrayed by his father into signing an illegal 
business contract that resulted in him being banned from Cairo for 15 
years.