Daniel Barenboim is more than one of the world’s great musicians. He is also one of the world’s great public figures. In him, the two things unite and are inseparable. He stands in the tradition of Arturo Toscanini, Pablo Casals and Yehudi Menuhin as a classical music giant who is also a thinker and a moral beacon. In modern times, there has been no one to compare with him.
As a pianist, accompanist and conductor, Mr Barenboim has always spoken through his music to the better angels of the world. Yet through his lecturing and writing, through his work in the Middle East, and through his championing of the arts and justice, he has never been afraid to take a stand either. Recently, he has been playing a characteristically determined role helping to lead the arts back to life after the pandemic. And, as the writer Norman Lebrecht points out, he is the only living classical musician who has access to world leaders.
Last week Mr Barenboim announced that, at 79 and in poor health, he is taking “a step back” for the coming months. There was no explicit mention of retirement and, since he is a ferociously determined person in everything he does, we must hope that he will eventually be able to take the podium and the world stage again. But there is no mistaking that his announcement leaves a vast void in the musical world and beyond, since artistic and moral figures of his kind come among us only rarely.
As Sir Simon Rattle said last week, Mr Barenboim is the living embodiment of lifetime achievement. He has been playing the piano in public since the late 1940s when he was in short trousers. As an adult, he has been a dominant presence in classical music of every kind – keyboard, orchestral and operatic, contemporary as well as classical – since the 1960s.
It is also a lifetime global achievement. His journey has taken him from Buenos Aires to Berlin, via Paris, Chicago and Ramallah along the way. He helped challenge the ban on Wagner’s music in Israel. He spoke out, at the Proms in 2017, against nationalism. The pandemic forced him to cancel a planned tour with his Arab-Israeli West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in central Africa.
Britain has been vastly enriched by his presence in multiple ways, not only as a pianist and conductor but as a Reith lecturer in 2006 and a flag bearer, along with Ban Ki-moon and Doreen Lawrence, at the opening of the 2012 Olympic Games. Over the years he has become a global champion of the music of England’s Edward Elgar, whom he once described as making “the best case against Brexit, because he was a pan-European composer”.
Thanks in no small measure to Mr Barenboim, this country can no longer be dismissed internationally, as it was a century ago, as “the land without music”. Instead we are one of the most creative and successful musical nations of the world in every form. But music education in British schools and colleges is now being cynically starved of resources and support by the government. We don’t merely need Mr Barenboim in good health. We need to follow his inspiring example too.
