Daniel Barenboim

Wagner is contrapuntal in a philosophical way as well as a musical way. What I mean by that is that every tendency has its opposite, and you see that in the man himself. He's a metaphysical hermaphrodite - he embraces hard and soft, masculine and feminine.

When I played my first concert with an orchestra, I was eight years old in Berlin.

I have music in my brain all the time, all sorts.

In order to lift a certain object from the ground, we have to use energy. But then to sustain it at that level, we have to keep on adding energy, or otherwise, the object falls to the ground. It's exactly the same thing with the sound.

I maintain music is not here to make us forget about life. It's also here to teach us about life: the fact that everything starts and ends, the fact that every sound is in danger of disappearing, the fact that everything is connected - the fact that we live and we die.

Most of the dramatism in Wagner comes from a very close link between the music and the language of the text. So much of the expressivity of Wagner's music dramas comes from the singers' capacity to play with the sound of the language. This kind of thing you can do very well in concert performance.

You don't go out and play Beethoven's 'Opus 111' without having rethought about it every time you play.

There are many wonderful orchestras in the world, but very few who have a character or personality of their own. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra is one of them, and I think it very important to recognize and respect that character.

I think the most important thing for a listener is to realize that he, too, should not listen to music in a passive way; that if you sit in a concert hall and expect to be moved or taken off your seat by the music, it will not happen.

I believe education is much more important than we assume.

For many people, music is here to let them forget the daily chores of life.

I feel that the Jews have always had a special connection to this part of the world, which in geographical terms was called Palestine for so many centuries.

I don't like possessions.

You find Jews, Irish, and Italians in every orchestra.

There are many types of silence. There is a silence before the note, there is a silence at the end and there is a silence in the middle.

You used to queue for three days and two nights for tickets for Rubinstein. People stayed in the queue for the whole day.

On Nov. 5, 2012, my friend Elliott Carter died in New York at the age of 103. For me, he was and remains one of the most interesting figures of music history in the past century.

Every concert I've finished with the knowledge I've played a fistful of wrong notes.

More and more, we're used to taking things in through the eyes rather than through the ears, and opera is more of a spectacle.

The Barenboim Foundation has nothing to do with politics.