Daniel Barenboim: Baton charge

Daniel Barenboim ignored an Israeli security travel ban to give a concert in Ramallah for Palestinian students. No one was surprised: as the controversial pianist-conductor tells Mark Pappenheim, it isn't the first time he has used music to offer a vision of peace

Daniel Barenboim, the Argentine-born Israeli pianist-conductor, was in London last month to perform at the Royal Festival Hall and sign copies of his latest CD. Recorded live in Buenos Aires two years ago, at a solo recital marking the 50th anniversary of his public debut, it has just been released by EMI to coincide with his 60th birthday. (For anyone having problems with the maths: he was born on 15 November 1942 and gave his first concert, aged only seven, on 19 August 1950.)

The celebratory CD punctuates a typically busy period for Barenboim, as he commutes between his home in Paris, his two main conducting jobs in Chicago and Berlin, and any number of guest appearances elsewhere – including, as a new addition to the international concert circuit, the West Bank town of Ramallah, where he recently braved the warnings of the Israeli army (and the death threats of fellow-Israelis) to play before an audience of Palestinian children.

"I must tell you," he confides, "that when I came back from Ramallah in September, I really felt I had done something good. For many of these Palestinian children, it was the first time they ever had a positive thought about anything to do with Israel. I asked one young girl, 'Are you glad I came?'. And she said, 'Yes, because until now I only saw Israeli tanks and Israeli soldiers, and now I see an Israeli musician'."

Sadly, not all Israelis shared that positive reaction. "With friends like Barenboim, who needs enemies?" snarled The Jerusalem Post; more death threats followed, and a few days later, Daniel Barenboim and his wife were attacked while eating in a Jerusalem restaurant.

Last year, he attracted similar flak when he and the Staatskapelle, the orchestra of his Berlin Staatsoper, played the Act I Prelude from Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde as an encore after a concert in Jerusalem. No matter that Barenboim is now arguably the world's leading Wagner conductor – a regular fixture for the past 21 years at the composer's own Festspielhaus in Bayreuth; only the second conductor (after Solti), and the first in the digital age, to commercially record all 10 of the composer's major operas (in a series just completed on Teldec with the recent release of a sonically superb Flying Dutchman); as well as the first ever to conduct all 10 works in a complete staged cycle (totalling some 40 hours of music in all), a feat that Barenboim accomplished not just once, but twice within a month, at the Staatsoper earlier this year.

No matter that he announced his choice of encore at the end of the advertised programme and gave anyone who didn't want to hear it time to leave first (only 50 did). No matter that the supposed Israel-wide ban on performances of "Hitler's favourite composer" is something of a myth – as Barenboim points out, Israelis can listen to Wagner's music on the radio, they can buy it on CD, watch it on TV, and even have "The Ride of the Valkyries" as a ring-tone on their mobile phones. No matter that, rabid (albeit inconsistent) anti-Semite though he may have been, Wagner himself had been dead for 50 years before Hitler enlisted his music to supply the soundtrack to the rise and fall of the Third Reich. No matter that the Tristan prelude is possibly the single most influential passage in all modern music. No matter that Barenboim is probably Israel's most prominent cultural ambassador – a man whose Jewishness and Israeli citizenship have always been central to his identity – or that he had long since proved his patriotic credentials by flying back to Israel to perform during both the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli wars, and during the Gulf War, too.

No matter any of these things. The mere fact that he had dared to play Wagner's music live in concert in Jerusalem was enough to have Israeli politicians of all parties calling for a national boycott of him.

For Barenboim, it is no coincidence that these two performances of his provoked similar reactions. As he sees it, the two problems – of playing Wagner in Israel and of Israel's relationship with the Palestinians – are linked, because both are rooted in an endemic Israeli refusal to let go of the past and face up to the future.

Take that myth about Wagner's music always having been banned in Israel. "The Israel Philharmonic itself played Wagner at its second ever concert," he points out, "back in 1936" – a concert conducted, incidentally, by that confirmed anti-Fascist, Arturo Toscanini. "It was only after Kristallnacht in 1938," he continues, "that the Wagner 'taboo' came into existence, when the members of the orchestra themselves voted not to play Wagner any more, because of the associations that his music then evoked with the Nazi ideology.

"For me, this is perfectly understandable. Therefore, if there are people today who suffer from these horrible associations, then it's obvious that they should not be subjected to hearing this music. This is why I would never include it in a subscription series, for example. But why should these people be able to stop others, who fortunately do not suffer from such associations, from hearing it?"

Yet, curiously, he notes, far from weakening with time, as first-hand memories of the Nazi era grow dimmer, this aversion to Wagner seems to have increased. "It wasn't there before. It wasn't!" he insists. "It's part of the 'schizophrenia' that has developed in Israel during the past 30 years – this 'schizophrenia' that we have to hold on to everything that is Jewish lest the Holocaust is repeated now in the form of Arab aggression. This is why I say that there is a funny connection between the two problems – between Wagner and the Palestinians."

It began, he believes, with the 1967 war, when Israel suddenly found itself transformed from victim into victor, and simply wasn't equipped, historically, to handle its new role of occupying power. "Before then," he reflects, "the Jewish people never had to think about how to live with 'the other', except in so far as they were dominated by 'the other'. All our great Jewish ethics were brought into this world for us to live as a minority, not a majority. And we have not yet made the transition into being Israeli Jews, to having become a nation and a state, with our own agriculture and police and army, and all the things that belong in a normal state, including thieves and prostitutes, and other things they didn't have in the Warsaw Ghetto. So, for me, the conflict is an internal Israeli-Israeli, or Israeli-Jewish, problem first before it is an Israeli-Palestinian problem."

Though sad at the way his country has changed since he first arrived there, aged 10, in 1952, the recent collapse of the two-year-old Likud-led "National Unity Government" and Amram Mitzna's appointment as Labour leader have given him fresh hope. In the meantime, as a musician, he is able to offer a vision of a future peace that mere politicians cannot, or will not, provide, and that many Israelis – "who go to bed convinced that they'll wake up one morning and simply find the Palestinians gone" – aren't even prepared to contemplate. Hence his pioneering recital at Birzeit University in 1999 – the first time an Israeli artist had performed in the Occupied Territories – and his follow-up recitals there and in Ramallah in September. Hence also the creation of the West-Eastern Divan, the now annual summer school that he and the US-based Palestinian scholar Edward W Said launched, also in 1999, to bring young Arab and Israeli musicians together to make music and exchange views.

In Berlin, Barenboim is currently embroiled in a struggle to save the 260-year-old Staatsoper, of which he has been artistic director for the past 10 years, from threatened merger with its junior (and arguably less distinguished) rival, the Deutsche Oper. Once again, the problem – officially financial but in reality political – is rooted in history: the Staatsoper was in the once-divided city's East, the Deutsche Oper in the West. "For almost 50 years," observes Barenboim, "the people of West Berlin saw themselves as an island of freedom in the Communist ocean, and it is still difficult for them to accept that anything good can come out of the former East."

Fifty-odd years ago, as a seven-year-old in short trousers, Daniel Barenboim was forced to go out on stage at the end of his debut recital to apologise to his audience that he couldn't play any more encores because: "I've already played you everything I know." Nobody can predict whether the fate of his Staatsoper will have been settled by the time he brings its wonderful Staatskapelle over here for two Brahms symphony cycles, in London and Birmingham, early in the New Year – nor whether peace will once again be in prospect for the Palestinians. What is certain is that audiences, as well as politicians, haven't yet heard anything like the last of Daniel Barenboim.

Barenboim conducts the Staatskapelle, 16-17 Jan, Royal Festival Hall, London (020-7960 4242); 18-19 Jan, Symphony Hall, Birmingham (0121-780 3333)