Daniel Barenboim and transcendent timelessness

Daniel Barenboim processes life and music on another level. Michael Kimmelman writes about Barenboim in the Sunday Times, and marvels at this polymath.

The bookshelves behind him bulged with volumes in French, Spanish, German, English and Hebrew.

“Rubinstein read Cervantes in Spanish, Dostoyevsky in Russian, Voltaire in French,” Mr. Barenboim said. “Music has become specialized today. There used to be a different notion of musical culture. I believe that Furtwängler genuinely felt — maybe he was naïve, but he felt that he personally could save German culture from the Nazis. He wrote about the introduction to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony in relation to the Greek idea of chaos and catharsis. How many musicians think that way today?

Here's something to chew on from a book Barenboim recently wrote:

“When playing music, it is possible to achieve a unique state of peace, partly due to the fact that one can control, through sound, the relationship between life and death.” He adds, “Since every note produced by a human being has a human quality, there is a feeling of death with the end of each one, and through that experience there is a transcendence of all the emotions that these notes can have in their short lives; in a way, one is in direct contact with timelessness.”