Musicians - Daniel Barenboim

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	Musicians - Daniel Barenboim

Daniel Barenboim (born November 15, 1942) is an Argentinean-Israeli pianist and conductor. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina; his parents were Russian Jews. He now also is an Israeli national. Barenboim first came to fame as a pianist but now is as well known as a conductor and for his work with mixed orchestras of Arabs and Jews and for his collaboration with Palestine-born Edward Said. In 2001, he sparked a controversy in Israel by conducting the music of Wagner.

Marriages

Daniel Barenboim was married to Jacqueline du Pré until her death in 1987. His friendship with musicians Itzhak Perlman, Zubin Mehta, and Pinchas Zukerman, and marriage to Jacqueline du Pré led to the famous film by Christopher Nupen of their Schubert "Trout" Quintet; collectively, the five referred to themselves as The Jewish Musical Mafia.

As du Pré lay stricken with advanced Multiple Sclerosis, Barenboim lived with pianist Elena Bashkirova and fathered two children with Bashkirova before his wife's death, apparently with his wife's consent. (She too had had other relationships). Barenboim and Bashkirova married in 1988, shortly after Jacqueline's death.

Career

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 Markevitch'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 and later as conductor and pianist with the Berlin Philharmonic), Johannes Brahms (with John Barbirolli and Zubin Mehta) 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 currently is 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.

Conducting Wagner in Israel

On July 7, 2001, Barenboim led the Berlin Staatskapelle in part of Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde at the Israel Festival in Jerusalem. The concert sparked an outcry, with Barenboim being branded as a fascist by some Israelis. Wagner's music has been taboo in Israel, because Adolf Hitler's theories of racial purity and extermination of Jews drew partly from anti-Semitic writings by Wagner, his favorite composer.

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