Daniel Barenboim argues tempo should come from harmony, not the composer's metronome
Daniel Barenboim gave his first formal recital in Buenos Aires aged seven and went on to lead orchestras in Paris, Chicago, Milan and Berlin. He plays Bach with the sustaining pedal and brushes aside the period-instrument movement, insisting that speed must grow from a piece's harmony rather than from historical markings.
Born on 15 November 1942 to two professional pianists, Barenboim learned first from his mother and then only from his father. His public debut came on 19 August 1950. The family moved to Israel in 1952, and two years later he met Wilhelm Furtwängler in Salzburg, who called him a phenomenon and invited him to play with the Berlin Philharmonic; his father judged it too soon after the war for a Jewish boy to perform in Germany. He also studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and by 1957 he had played in New York under Leopold Stokowski.
In 1967 he married the cellist Jacqueline du Pré at the Western Wall, with Zubin Mehta, temporarily renamed Moshe Cohen, as a witness. Multiple sclerosis ended her career in 1973, and she died in 1987. Conducting took over much of his working life from a 1966 debut with the English Chamber Orchestra: he directed the Orchestre de Paris, was dismissed from the new Opéra Bastille before it opened, followed Georg Solti in Chicago in 1991, and from 1992 led the Berlin State Opera, which made him conductor for life of its orchestra in 2000.
With the scholar Edward Said he founded the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra and later an academy in Berlin, opened in 2016, where young musicians from Israel and the Arab world study together. Its hall, the Pierre Boulez Saal, was designed by Frank Gehry. He holds seven Grammys.
His interpretations are pointedly personal. He opposes setting tempo from metronome marks and resists the quicker Beethoven of conductors like Roger Norrington. In Bach he often lets one fugue voice sing out over the others, something a harpsichord could never do, saying he values the long tradition of playing Bach more than imitating the sound of the composer's era. Ill health led him to leave Berlin in January 2023, and in 2025 he announced he has Parkinson's disease.
Source: Daniel Barenboim
