Easton Press Daniel Barenboim books
Who is Daniel Barenboim?
Barenboim started piano lessons at the age of five with his mother, continuing to study with his father Enrique, who remained his only teacher. In August 1950, when he was only seven years old, he gave his first formal concert in Buenos Aires.
In 1952, the Barenboim family moved to Israel. Two years later, in the summer of 1954, his parents brought him to Salzburg to take part in Igor Markevich's conducting classes. During that summer he also met and played for Wilhelm Furtwängler. In 1955 he studied harmony and composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
Barenboim made his debut as a pianist in Vienna and Rome in 1952, Paris in 1955, London in 1956, and New York in 1957 under the baton of Leopold Stokowski. Regular concert tours of Europe, the United States, South America, Australia and the Far East followed thereafter.
Barenboim made his first recording in 1954, and later recorded complete cycles of the piano sonatas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven and piano concertos by Mozart (as both conductor and pianist), Beethoven (with Otto Klemperer), Johannes Brahms (with John Barbirolli) and Bartók (with Pierre Boulez).
Following his debut as a conductor with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London in 1967, Barenboim was invited to conduct by many European and American symphony orchestras. Between 1975 and 1989 he was Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, where he conducted much contemporary music.
Barenboim made his opera conducting debut in 1973 with a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Edinburgh Festival. He made his debut at Bayreuth in 1981, conducting there regularly until 1999.
Barenboim has been the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, a position he took up in 1991, following in the footsteps of Georg Solti. He is planning to leave the CSO at the end of the 2006 season. He also is music director of the Berlin State Opera, a position which he has held since 1992.
He was married to the British cellist Jacqueline du Pré, a gifted musician whose career was tragically cut short by multiple sclerosis. In the last years of du Pre's life, Barenboim set up home in Paris with pianist Elena Bashkirova, and fathered two children by her. They married in 1988.
He is also known for his work with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, a Sevilla-based orchestra of young Arab and Jewish musicians that he co-founded with the late Palestinian-American scholar and activist Edward Said (whom Barenboim called his best friend).
Barenboim has been an outspoken critic of the Israeli settlements and of Israel's government since Rabin. He is also a supporter of Palestinian rights. In 2001, he sparked a controversy in Israel by conducting the music of Wagner in concert, as such a performance had not been staged in Israel since 1938 and was informally taboo.
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