Barenboim: Conflict ‘eats at Jewish soul’

On the 60th anniversary of the birth of Israel, the pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim considers the fate and the future of the country which he regards as his home – but where he is still an “outsider”.

There are photographs hanging on the walls of my dressing room in the Staatsoper Berlin, photographs that remind me of what I see when I look out the windows of my house in Jerusalem.

They are slightly faded, and here and there the paper is crumbling, but one can easily recognise the views: The Old City, the Dome of the Rock with its shining cupola, the walls, the gates.

Sometimes I sit in this room before a performance, looking at these pictures and thinking of Jerusalem, of Israel, my home.

Before 1989, this room was supposedly a refuge of the East German Stasi, the state police. If I happened to be a sentimental person, that fact would surely help me to become unsentimental, but I am not a sentimental person. The situation in the Middle East is much too close to me, much too personal for me to be sentimental about it.

Since 1952, I have owned an Israeli passport. Since I was 15 years old, I have travelled the world as a musician. I have lived in London and in Paris and I commuted for years between Chicago and Berlin.

(Continue reading: BBC News)

~ by Sohail on May 14, 2008.