Beethoven Ludwig van - Parallels and paradoxes : explorations in music and society

by Ara Guzelimian

You must meet my friend Edward Said!

Daniel Barenboim was most emphatic about that. He and I had just had the first substantial conversation of our acquaintance, working on various aspects of a Carnegie Hall Perspectives project that explored his multifaceted musical interests and collaborations. With his boundless curiosity about everything around him, he began to pepper me with questions on my personal history. The moment he discovered my own Middle Eastern origins, he insisted on introducing me immediately to Edward Said.

The friendship between Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim dates back a decade earlier to a chance meeting in a London hotel lobby in the early 1990s and has blossomed into an extraordinary collaboration. A passion for music and ideas is surely the binding force, but there is also the powerful underlying pull of parallel personal geographies. Both men come from a complex overlapping of cultures.

Edward Said was born in Jerusalem into a Palestinian family, but grew up largely in Cairo, once removed already from his origins. As a member of a rather anglicized Christian Arab family living in a predominantly Muslim society he was arguably displaced once more. And he was displaced yet again to the United States where, as a teenager, he attended boarding school. Even his fathers history is geographically complex. Prior to Edwards birth, Wadie Said had lived for a time in the United States, had attained American citizenship, and had even fought in the United States Army before returning to Palestine and Egypt. That peripatetic nature is readily found in many Middle Eastern family histories.

Daniel Barenboims background is just as complex. He was born into a Russian Jewish family that immigrated during his grandparents generation to Buenos Aires, where there was a thriving Jewish population, the third largest of any city in the world at the time. He subsequently immigrated with his parents to the newly created state of Israel, and his homes since that time have included London, Paris, Jerusalem, Chicago, and Berlin.

In each case, music was a formative and defining passion, fueled by recordings and the surprisingly rich musical life to be found in Cairo and Buenos Aires in the years following World War II. When Daniel Barenboim drew me into their friendship, it was partly in immediate recognition of striking parallels in my own background. I was born into an Armenian family in Cairo and many of my earliest memories are musical onesmy brother playing Bach Inventions for his piano lessons or the entire family going to a concert at the original Cairo Opera House (for which Verdi wrote Aida), where I remember seeing an ornate white piano reputed to have belonged to King Farouk. My parents attended some of the same memorable concerts and operas as the teenage Edward Said and, in fact, my mother remembers well the stationery store owned by Edwards father.

Edward Said is now best known as an extraordinarily influential and innovative intellectual force, an astute commentator on literature and culture, on cultures relationship to society, particularly in examining questions of Orientalism, a field of studies which he has pioneered. He is also a most forceful and impassioned commentator on the endlessly complex conflicts in the Middle East. But music still remains essential in his intellectual and personal life. He has written an enormous body of musical essays, and he remains an accomplished pianist.

As music director of both the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Deutsche Staatsoper in Berlin, Daniel Barenboim is a central figure in the musical world. He is one of the most recorded artists in history, with a nearly fifty-year span of recordings dating back to his earliest discs made when he was in his teens. He has taken numerous highly public and courageous stands, becoming an outspoken advocate for the performance of Wagners music in Israel, fighting the lingering presence of anti-Semitism in Germanys cultural politics, and becoming the first and most prominent Israeli musician ever to perform in the Palestinian West Bank (an invitation organized, not surprisingly, by Edward Said).