Daniel Barenboim
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 May 2006
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim. As this year's Reith Lecturer on Radio 4 he described how he interprets and understands life through music. On Desert Island Discs he gives a personal insight into his own life and career. He was a child prodigy - the only son of musical parents, he gave his first piano recital at the age of seven and when he was 11 the legendary conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler described him as 'a phenomenon'.
His marriage to the British cellist Jacqueline du Prè made them the most celebrated musical couple of their day - but less than two years after they were married, she began to show symptoms of multiple sclerosis - the disease that would kill her. In a moving interview recorded in his home in Jerusalem, Daniel Barenboim talks frankly about their relationship and the cruelty of her illness; he reveals his own musical influences and also discusses his plans to spend more time playing the piano, after stepping down as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra later this year.
He would, Daniel says, only take musical scores to the island, and not records.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Book: Ethics by Benedict Spinoza Luxury: A piano with a mattress
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2006, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a musician. He's one of the finest exponents of classical music |
| 0:34.7 | alive in the world today, a brilliant pianist and conductor and a music director of |
| 0:39.2 | the first rank. For the past five weeks he's been delivering his vision of music in the BBC's wreath lectures here on Radio 4. |
| 0:47.0 | Today we've come to his house in Jerusalem overlooking the walls of the old city |
| 0:52.0 | to hear what pieces of music matter most to him |
| 0:55.2 | and how they relate to a life vivid with achievement and incident. |
| 1:00.0 | I've had my share of suffering in life, he said, and very often in those bad moments music comes into my brain |
| 1:06.9 | and the unhappiness will give way to something more pleasant and easier to live with. |
| 1:11.3 | He is, of course, Daniel Barrenbooam. Daniel, music is and always has |
| 1:16.8 | been your life. I know that ever since you were born in Argentina. Would you go as far as to say |
| 1:22.3 | it was the first language you ever knew? |
| 1:25.0 | I don't know because in a way I don't think of it only as a language because language creates |
| 1:32.0 | very precise associations, whereas music creates associations |
| 1:37.2 | that very often are not precise. |
| 1:40.2 | Having said all of that, I think I must have been conscious of music very, very early on because my parents and I lived in a rather small flat in Buenos Aires, both my parents taught a piano so that |
| 1:59.9 | whenever the doorbell rang, it was somebody coming for a piano listen. I must have thought |
| 2:05.6 | as a baby and as a child that the whole world played piano because it's the only kind of people |
| 2:10.1 | I met. So it was always very natural. You started playing the violin first. I wanted to start studying the violin but they couldn't find a violin small enough. I needed a quarter violin and then I realized that the piano was actually a much more comfortable |
| 2:25.4 | instrument it had three legs it stood on its own you didn't have to hold it it was |
| 2:30.4 | an independent beast and it had the notes you know I could put my thumb on the one of those |
... |
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