Play Softly and Wave a Short Stick

...He married the charming and renowned English cellist Jacqueline du Pre, with whom he made beautiful music on and off the podium...

...a life spent enjoying only the sensual aspects of life...

...what will he discover by the time he's 80...

...can be perceived emotionally, and not just rationally...

...prepare the first draft version of the book"), there was a lot of varied living and learning to draw on...

...Otto Klemperer "was the most uncompromising musician and human being...

...Soon he was playing for the great Wilhelm Furtwangler, who, deeply impressed, let him attend his rehearsals and wrote him a glowing letter of recommendation...

...But oh, the jungle of cliches, the morass of banality...

...all his grandparents were Russian Jews, and both his parents were piano teachers...

...Enough, however, of this passing parade of often repetitious and sometimes self-contradictory portraits in praise...

...You might think that a formulation Barenboim keeps so doggedly reiterating is his own...

...Evidently different rules obtain for angels and human beings...

...says whatever little he does say rather poorly...

...It is really a collection of random thoughts about music and musicians, and Barenboim's own music-making, interspersed with thoughts on other matters: Israeli politics, say, or differences between languages...

...Perhaps he did not regard them as exclusively decorative...

...I rejoice in having the Director of the Chicago Symphony and Berlin State Opera on my side about such things as surtitles in opera (he is for them), compact discs (ditto), live recordings (ditto), the need for programing more contemporary music (ditto), composers as the best interpreters of their music (he's against that notion), the use of period instruments (ditto...

...In fact, I remember listening to a radio broadcast featuring her in a concerto when a cellist friend of mine commented on the number of times the eminent soloist hit wood??the most common bowing error...

...Or he may have heard it directly from Szell during one of their several encounters...

...The signal beneficiary of this is his late first wife...

...But it is the English in the book that is most shocking, and for that we must blame the publisher as well...

...He never looked "at himself in a mirror, not even to comb his hair," and was "totally uninterested in anything decorative??with the exception of women...

...Einstein said that the most inexplicable thing about the universe is that it is explicable...

...Yet if there is one clear leitmotif in A Life in Music, it is the insistence on the musician's knowing more than seems strictly necessary...

...Meanwhile his father, for many years his only piano teacher, decided to resettle in Israel when Daniel was nine...

...But there is no humor in any of this, except in quotations from others, mostly without attribution, as in "The Austrians really are the shrewdest people in the world: They have managed to turn Beethoven into an Austrian and Hitler into a German...

...he never mentions them...

...Exclamation point, in lieu of question mark, the author's...

...This woman is not even mentioned in the book...

...But the happiness was short-lived: Jackie developed multiple sclerosis, had to stop playing, and died young...

...But partly also for economic reasons: Barenboim was spending too much money on honorariums for his artist friends, and on his own rather astronomic salary...

...Her ideal musician had to think with his heart and feel with his brain...

...Yet neither about them nor about himself has he anything amusing, dramatic, revelatory to report...

...The book even ends in a towering platitude: "As I continue my life in music, the distinction becomes clearer between the works that have an occasional interest and those that have become lifelong companions...

...Fluent in six languages, he has been acclaimed on four continents...

...This despite Barenboim's describing himself as "quite fluent in several languages??English, Hebrew, German, French, Italian and Spanish...

...I wonder how Daniel's close friends, Pinchas Zukerman and Itzhak Perlman, who get a fair share of praise in the book but nothing quite like that, will feel about this statement when they read it...

...At the very least, I thought, Barenboim would give us a full account of his firing from the cushy job of running the Bastille Opera, the ultra-modern new Paris opera house whose directorship, with the help of Pierre Boulez, he was appointed to by Jacques Chirac in 1987...

...One could almost paraphrase [wrong word, this] him and say that the most explicable thing about music is its inexplicability...

...Never have I come across such a speak-no-evil kind of artist's story before...

...Yet there is Jacqueline being praised for not having changed her way of playing since early youth...

...I am amused, too, by the author's self-contradictions, e.g., "French...

...then [sic] there is less reason for nervousness...

...I wouldn't presume to say, but I cannot help repeating my disappointment at not finding anything about the cellist's illness and inability to play, its effect on her psyche, and her modes, if any, of compensating for her crushing deprivation...

...In the winter of 1955, Barenboim went to Paris to study, like virtually anybody who was anybody, with Nadia Boulanger, who filled in the gaps Ben-Haim's instruction had left...

...After the 1988 elections, President Francois Mitterrand's friend and financier Pierre Berge was put in charge of all the Paris opera houses other than the Chatelet...

...Later, on his own, Barenboim met, often played with, and not infrequently became the intimate of, some of music's brightest stars...

...You cannot play a Beethoven sonata and put it into the bank or in the refrigerator, hoping to get back and to find it there later in the same condition...

...will react differently to Debussy's La Mer than to a Bruckner symphony...

...pulling them out and stringing them together risks turning what is actually a doughy mass into a box of raisins...

...I did not have the knowledge, nor the shoulders...

...Anyway, on and on the litany goes...

...The pages devoted to Jacqueline du Pre are enough to give hagiography a bad name...

...To be sure, in a brief Foreword, he warns us that "the autobiographical thread in this book exists only to give a certain continuity to the reflections on music and on the relationship between music and life...

...In one way or another, old age makes all of us endure a similar loss, and a digression on this subject would have been at least as welcome as the one telling us when it is or isn't appropriate for a Jew to use the contemptuous expression goyim naches (i.e., the kind of trivial delight non-Jews allegedly indulge in...

...Besides, Berge was obliged to pay him a handsome severance, and he secured the equally good Chicago Symphony job...

...I have always considered Barenboim a good but unexciting pianist, and what I have heard of his conducting has struck me as even less exciting...

...there is more about pianism, some of it, inevitably, fairly technical...

...The statement is so ingenuous, so naive, as to be almost endearing...

...She played with a great deal of rubato, with great freedom...

...Is A Life in Music wholly worthless, then...

...Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires in 1942...

...From other musicians this would have felt "wilful and capricious,' but her playing was "so completely and inevitably right" that the listener "felt like a mere mortal faced with somebody who possessed some kind of ethereal dimension...

...In the summer of 1952, on the way there, the family first stopped in Salzburg, then in Vienna and Rome...

...Furthermore, "Of all the great musicians I have met in my life, I have never encountered anyone for whom music was such a natural form of expression as it was for Jacqueline...

...I often experience totally different feelings about the same music at different times," he informs us, adding: "There is nothing fixed or frozen about music...

...another is that her "way of playing did not really change from the time she was a teenager...

...What, then, is this book about...

...Anyone sufficiently interested to have read this far, though, must know enough about Barenboim's subsequent career not to require a further step-by-step account...

...But then he will write about doing "Pelleas et Melisande by Debussy with Boulez," which is downright patronizing...

...To think that this man is only 50...

...Beyond that: "I have learned a lot about music by reading books that have nothing to do with it??books by Spinoza and Aristotle, for instance...

...True, there are three other famous works by that title, but only Debussy's is an opera, as required by the context...

...From other points of view, presumably not...

...in his Reverberations, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (who numbered Barenboim among his favorite accompanists) observes, "I was made happy by the harmony between them" and their "exquisite relationship...

...been the ideal musician...

...So the book seems to be for enlightened music lovers...

...Next to Barenboim's firm grasp of the obvious comes his fanatical partisanship...

...He concertized in Israel, studied composition with Paul Ben-Haim, who proved insufficiently rigorous, and, by 1954, was back in Salzburg, they youngest student in Markevich's conducting class...

...Boulanger made young Daniel aware "that musical structure...

...He dismissed Barenboim partly for political and anti-elitist reasons: As a millionaire Leftist, he felt that Barenboim's programing wasn't "popular" enough...

...By 1956, he was studying in Rome and Siena, where he made friends with Claudio Abbado (whom he never again mentions) and Zubin Mehta (whom he rhapsodizes about...

...Suffice it to say that here is a triple-threat musician: piano soloist, chamber-music collaborator with some of the finest instrumentalists and singers, and symphonic and opera conductor...

...That last is particularly gross...

...Although Pablo Casals was no longer active, there were the great French cellist Pierre Fournier and the distinguished Hungarian-born American Janos Starker, each at least the equal of Mrs...

...Reviewed by John Simon The first salient fact about Daniel Barenboim's quasi-autobiographical A Life in Music is that the author chooses to reveal as little as possible about himself...

...Why alienate the French opera authorities, who, once they realize that populism in opera doesn't work, may yet engage him as a guest conductor...

...Even where a celebrity is humorless, e.g., Karl Bohm, he is excused with "his sense of humor was to be found more in music" than in everyday intercourse...

...Josef Krips taught Barenboim "that music was aristocratic and not democratic," whereas Zubin Mehta, who became and remained his "soul mate," fascinated him by his "facility in...

...Barenboim insists on musical performance as something evolutionary...

...Not quite...

...And certainly music is an art that can shed light on life, yet not quite as brightly as the fine arts, various forms of literature, theater, and film...

...translating musical ideas into gestures...

...About all this we get the barest minimum in the book...

...Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau "has an uncanny mastery of this art of 'going out' to the audience and 'drawing it in,'" and Nathan Milstein "has remained for me the supreme example of the pure violinist...

...But if that's truly how it is, wasn't Jacqueline a bit cavalier even for a genius, a bit remiss even for an angel, to have known no Wagner until Daniel came along...

...Ironically, the man Berge brought in to replace him, the young Korean conductor Myung-Whun Chung, is proving every bit as good as Barenboim would have been...

...One thing emerges unmistakably: Barenboim's chauvinism about music...

...Why, Daniel tells us that he, for one, doesn't even play the same note in a piece with the same hand every time it comes up...

...Clifford Curzon "had a very personal sense of sound...

...At the home of the Austrian-born music lover Ernesto Rosenthal, where the touring musical greats would drop in, and where chamber music was regularly played, the child prodigy Daniel was encouraged in his pianistics by the likes of Sergiu Celibidache and Adolf Busch...

...Claudio Arrau has "since my childhood...

...Or whether she knew about the other woman whom he met while she, Jackie, was still alive, and married soon after her death...

...The autobiographer reminiscing, the critic evaluating, the fellow instrumentalist selflessly humble before genius, the husband recollecting with posthumous uxoriousness, the guilty spouse expiating...

...Barenboim informs us that the best communication occurs if the artist becomes oblivious to his audience...

...The other cellist who caught the public's imagination was, of course, Rostropovich, but he was in the Soviet Union and only sporadically came to the West...

...In the one bit of Italian, a very famous quotation, Barenboim suffers a memory lapse: "Prima la parola" for "Prima le parole...

...Jacqueline, apparently, "had a gift very few performers have, the gift of making you feel she was actually composing the music as she was playing...

...Certainly music can be an effective escape from life, yet the same can be said of anything from philately to baseball...

...A very direct person," he was one of the people least "interested in outward appearances...

...Or my personal favorite, "The performer lacks the originality, the creativity of the composer...

...Deja entendu, anyone...

...The second is that the pianist-conductor??or is it conductor-pianist...

...The book also is chock full of truisms and banalities, such as "The problem of interpretation becomes more complicated when you play somebody else's work," or "Once you know how something is constructed...

...The dualism of feeling and thinking must be resolved to a state of unity in which one thinks with the heart and feels with the brain...

...For these casually tossed-off compliments are, at least, eminently readable...

...A performance is valid only for the time and for the place in which it happens...

...With most musicians you feel that they are human beings who happen to play music...

...Of Edwin Fischer, we learn that he had "the most natural legato in a pianist" and "a natural luminosity of sound when he played chords.' Furtwangler "achieved that ideal state??of thinking with the heart and feeling with the brain...

...And while we are at it, let me point out the threadbareness of that title, which goes back to Stanislavsky's My Life in Art, and was used by Leonie Rosenstiel for her Nadia Boulanger: A Life in Music, and probably by others as well...

...His sponsor, Artur Rubinstein, was "of all the great artists I have met during my life...

...175...

...Our Daniel enters the lion's den of internecine competitiveness with a good word for every colleague he meets, every potential rival he encounters...

...second marriage and fatherhood apparently have no bearing on "a life in music...

...I run the danger of making A Life in Music sound better than it is...

...That, in music, the parts must relate to the whole...

...William Steinberg "was an extremely cultured musician," and John Barbirolli conducted "some of the finest performances of French music I ever heard...

...Although it is not clear exactly how it was written or spoken (Lewin's concluding editorial note mentions "a great deal of written material," but also thanks Lesley Fuchs-Robetin for "transferring many of our taped discussions and corrections to paper," and Gitta Deutsch-Holroyd-Reece "who helped...

...Igor Markevich went even further, earmarking him for a career in conducting...

...by far the most direct and least pretentious," and, once you heard him play a piece, "you could not imagine it played any other way...

...I will spare you some of the standard grammatical errors, and give you only major assaults on syntax and style: "as regards whom he influenced me very much...

...Perhaps one can justify some of the doughiness by pointing out that language is not a musician's forte??it is at most his mezzo forte...

...One is that until he introduced her to Tristan und Isolde, "she had never heard a note of Wagner...

...119), followed by "in French a heavy accent is often placed at the end of words" (p...

...In her case ??because of her personality, charisma, and intensity of feeling??you wondered "if there could be, after all, some valid reason for changing the printed score...

...a bell-like quality on the piano," and Artur Schnabel, who was criticized by purists "for being too emotional," and by others "for being too cerebral," demonstrated that "there is no contradiction between these two qualities," and that, as Barenboim says, "you can think with your emotions and feel with your thoughts...

...One doesn't find out what he was before that...

...And that "We are all very much of a muchness...

...The one exception is the episode where Ben-Gurion (born Grun) tries to persuade the Barenboims, whose name is the Yiddish version of Birnbaum (German for pear tree) to change it to the Hebrew Agassi (pear), because it "would be far easier to remember" and "those who could not pronounce Barenboim would manage Agassi, and might even think it was Italian...

...Clearly, Jackie was one of those musician angels we all know from Renaissance paintings...

...By reversing a neat paradox, Barenboim obtains something so commonplace that it isn't worth saying...

...The Barenboims refused, so the boy, instead of gloriously swinging a racket, was to make a fine racket on the piano...

...As for Rafael Kubelik, "I had met very vivacious people before, but they were often superficial, I had met serious people before, but they lacked Kubelik's vivacity...

...He was beginning to give concerts all over, and, in December of 1956, with a letter from Artur Rubinstein to Sol Hurok, was engaged for a highly successful American tour...

...On the other hand, Barenboim is not above lengthy digressions such as the one on his friendship with David Ben-Gurion, yet even about him he offers us only conventional eulogizing...

...Indeed, one wonders what sorts of readers the author had in mind...

...Thus while playing a Beethoven concerto or conducting a Beethoven symphony, it greatly helps to know, we are told, such seemingly unrelated things as the string quartets...

...A successful businessman and president of Yves St...

...We hear, too, about the director-designer Jean-Pierre Ponnelle that "he had the ideal combination of German education and Latin temperament...

...There seems to be scant room in Barenboim's bosom for these or any other arts...

...where the accent is at the end of every word" (p...

...It appears to have been an ideal marriage...

...but even as a boy it made a great impression...

...Who is speaking...

...Actually, Barenboim lets slip out two unflattering things about du Pre...

...he was both Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and of the London Philharmonic...

...Best of all, "these qualities were somehow communicated to the orchestra...

...but either because he has never heard of Andre Agassi, or because he has no sense of humor, he doesn't...

...From this point of view...

...Barenboim probably realizes that even if Berge smells worse, he himself doesn't exude attar of roses either in this matter...

...You would think that he himself would crack some such joke...

...We read, for example, that "there was only one other cellist of Jacqueline's caliber??[Paul] Tortelier...

...A fluency, by the way, that does not prevent him from getting every bit of French wrong: thus folie de grandeur for folie des grandeurs [megalomania], Je m 'en fou for Jem 'en fous [I couldn't care less], and Champs Elysee for Champs Elysees...

...Or again, "I cannot remember who said it, but there is no better escape from life than through music, and yet there is no better way to understand life than through music...

...With her, you had the feeling that here was a musician who also happened to be a human being...

...listen, if you will, to his recording of Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony for Deutsche Grammophon...

...The Bible or the Talmud teach us not only how to deal with ourselves but also with our neighbors" (a double-header, that one...

...Nor does the husband of Jacqueline du Pre tell us the name of her illness, let alone what her life was like after she had to stop playing, and what she must have gone through...

...This wan paradox leaves me unenthralled, especially coming from I Cannot Remember Who...

...In fact, Barenboim has written??or taped in conversations with Michael Lewin??one of the most trivial and boring autobiographies by a famous artist I have ever read...

...Yet that does not mean his short book could not have been fascinating...

...He was a supreme example "of the fusion of the Latin and German mentality...

...From the cradle on, he was immersed in the rich musical life of the Argentine capital, where major international artists appeared regularly...

...Still, I hoped this was not to be taken literally, and that one who performed all over the world and met just about everybody would feel compelled to make some fascinating observations, would not be able to resist telling some good anecdotes, or would at least quote some marvelous comments from famous mouths...

...Laurent, he fancied himself an expert on opera...

...Which is it: always or merely often...

...In all three places the boy played for teachers and conductors, made important contacts, and heard for the first time operas and other music he had not been previously exposed to...

...Here is where Barenboim's book could have beenhelpful to humanity...

...a moral example to all musicians...

...He does not tell us much about conducting...

...But in the February 22, 1963, issue of Time, he may have read this observation of George Szell's: "Music is indivisible...