In the early 1990s, a chance meeting between Mr. Barenboim and the late Palestinian-born writer and Columbia University professor Edward Said in a London hotel lobby led to an intensive friendship that has had both political and musical repercussions. These two men, who should have been poles apart politically, discovered in that first meeting, which lasted for hours, that they had similar visions of Israeli/Palestinian possible future cooperation. They decided to continue their dialogue and to collaborate on musical events to further their shared vision of peaceful co-existence in the Middle East. This led to Mr. Barenboim's first concert on the West Bank, a piano recital at the Palestinian Birzeit University in February 1999, and to a workshop for young musicians from the Middle East that took place in Weimar, Germany, in August 1999.

Edward Said passed away in 2003 but his partnership with Daniel Barenboim lives on through the West-Eastern Divan Workshop and Orchestra and through the Barenboim-Said Foundation, which promotes music and co-operation through projects targeted at young Arabs and Israelis. In January 2005, Daniel Barenboim delivered the first Edward Said Lecture at Columbia University in New York City.

Daniel Barenboim Biography

Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires in 1942 to parents of Jewish Russian descent. He started piano lessons at the age of five with his mother, continuing to study with his father who remained his only other teacher. In August 1950, when he was only seven years old, he gave his first official concert in Buenos Aires.
Important influences in his development as a musician included Artur Rubinstein and Adolf Busch, both of whom performed in Argentina. The Barenboim family moved to Israel in 1952. Two years later, in the summer of 1954, the parents brought their son to Salzburg to take part in Igor Markevich's conducting classes. During that same summer he also met Wilhelm Furtwängler, played for him and attended some of the great conductor's rehearsals and a concert. Furtwängler subsequently wrote a letter including the words, "The eleven year-old Barenboim is a phenomenon …" that was to open many doors to Daniel Barenboim for a long time afterwards. In 1955 the young Daniel Barenboim studied harmony and composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

Daniel Barenboim made his debut as a pianist in Vienna and Rome in 1952, in Paris in 1955, in London in 1956 and in New York in 1957 with Leopold Stokowski conducting the Symphony of the Air. From then on, he made annual concert tours of the United States and Europe. He toured Australia in 1958 and soon became known as one of the most versatile pianists of his generation.

He made his first gramophone recordings in 1954 and soon began recording the most important works in the piano repertory, including complete cycles of the piano sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven and concertos by Mozart, Beethoven (with Otto Klemperer), Brahms (with Sir John Barbirolli) and Bartok (with Pierre Boulez).

During the same period, Mr. Barenboim began to devote more time to conducting. His close relationship with the English Chamber Orchestra, kindled in 1965, lasted over a decade, during which time they performed frequently in England, with Barenboim as both conductor and pianist, and made tours all over Europe, to the United States and Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Following his début as a conductor with the New Philharmonia Orchestra in London in 1967, Mr. Barenboim was in demand with all the leading European and American symphony orchestras. Between 1975 and 1989 he was Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, his tenure marked by a commitment to contemporary music, with performances of works by Lutoslawski, Berio, Boulez, Henze, Dutilleux, Takemitsu and others.

Daniel Barenboim has always been active as a chamber musician, performing with, among others, his late wife, cellist Jacqueline du Pré, as well as with Gregor Piatigorsky, Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman. He has also accompanied Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in lieder recitals.

Daniel Barenboim made his opera conducting début in 1973 with a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Edinburgh International Festival. In 1981 he made his début at the Bayreuth Festival, where he has conducted Tristan und Isolde, the Ring cycle, Parsifal and Die Meistersinger.

In 1991 he succeeded Sir Georg Solti as Music Director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, with whom he enjoyed countless successes in all the world's great concert halls for fifteen years. At the conclusion of his tenure in June 2006, the CSO musicians adopted a resolution naming him "our honorary conductor for life." In 1992 he became General Music Director of the Deutsche Staatsoper Berlin. In the autumn of 2000, the Staatskapelle Berlin appointed him Chief Conductor for Life. In 2006 he was named Maestro Scaligero at La Scala, Milan, where he will next perform Verdi's Requiem in November 2007 and a Wagner Ring cycle in 2010/2011, among other works. He also appears regularly with the Berlin Philharmonic and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. In February 2003, Mr. Barenboim won a Grammy for his recording of Wagner's Tannhäuser and he and the Staatskapelle Berlin received the Wilhelm Furtwängler Prize.

Daniel Barenboim is a prolific recording artist and has made recordings since 1954 for Westminster, EMI, Deutsche Grammophon, Decca, Philips, Sony Classical (CBS Masterworks), BMG, Erato Disques,Teldec Classics International and EuroArts Music. In recent years, EuroArts Music International has released several outstanding performances of Mr. Barenboim on DVD.

Musicians are by definition communicators. In their performances and with their unique interpretation of the music they convey the style and the meaning of a work to their audience. Daniel Barenboim's incisive intelligence, exceptional technique and meticulous musicianship have been at the core of many definitive performances and recordings as both pianist and conductor. He has also succeeded in building a variety of other bridges:

1. A Jew born during the Second World War - and an Israeli by nationality - he has worked closely over many years with three German orchestras - the Berlin Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle Berlin and the Bayreuth Festival Orchestra - in an atmosphere of mutual affection and respect.
2. Mr. Barenboim uses his music to cross all political and religious boundaries, e.g. by initiating the Israeli-Palestinian West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.
3. Mr. Barenboim is keen to draw young people to music as he believes they need more aesthetic education at school than is generally offered. To this end, he was instrumental in founding music kindergartens in Ramallah and Berlin in 2004 and 2005 respectively.
4. Mr. Barenboim has reached out, both in relation to his audiences and to opening himself up to new musical experiences. He has programmed contemporary works alongside repertoire from the classical and romantic eras. He has also expanded his repertoire to include African American music, Argentinian tango, jazz and Brazilian music and shared these experiences with his audiences.

In October 2002 Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said jointly received Spain's prestigious Prince of Asturias Concord Prize for their work in founding the West Eastern Divan Workshop. Mr. Barenboim was also named an honorary citizen of Spain. In November 2002 he was awarded the Tolerance Prize by the Protestant Academy of Tutzing, in southwestern Germany, for his efforts to bring Palestinians and Israelis together through music. The same month, the president of Germany awarded Mr. Barenboim the Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz, the highest honor given to someone who is not a head of state. In 2004, Mr. Barenboim received the Buber-Rosenzweig Medal, the Wolf Prize for the Arts in the Knesset in Jerusalem and the Haviva Reik Peace Award. In 2005, he won the Special Ambassador of Music Prize of Echo Klassik and was named the 2006 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University where he will deliver six lectures in autumn 2006. Also in 2006, Daniel Barenboim won the Kulturgroschen award, the Peace Prize from the Korn and Gerstenmann Foundation and the Music Prize of the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation. He was the first performer ever chosen to deliver the prestigious BBC Reith Lectures, which he delivered in London, Chicago, Berlin and Jerusalem; they were broadcast in the UK and on the BBC World Service.

Mr. Barenboim is the author of A Life in Music, and co-author of Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, a series of conversations between Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. Both books have been published in multiple languages.

Touring internationally throughout Germany, Spain, France, Great Britain, Swiss and USA Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra celebrated in August 2005 the first concert of the multi-national Ensemble in Ramallah/Palestine. This very special event was live broadcasted in whole Europe by EuroArts Music and recorded to be released later on DVD (including a 90 minute version of "Knowledge is the Beginning").

Edward Said - Biography 2006

Edward W. Said was born in Jerusalem, raised in Jerusalem and Cairo, and educated in the United States, where he attended Princeton (B.A. 1957) and Harvard (M.A. 1960; Ph.D. 1964). In 1963, he began teaching at Columbia University, where he currently is University Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He is the author of twenty-two books which have been translated into 35 languages, including Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975); Orientalism (1978); The Question of Palestine (1979); Covering Islam (1980); The World, The Text, and the Critic (1983); After the Last Sky (1986); Musical Elaborations (1991); Culture and Imperialism (1993); Representations of the Intellectual: The Reith Lectures (1994); Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (1996); Entre Guerre et Paix (1997); and Out of Place: A Memoir (1999). In addition, he edited Henry James's Complete Stories 1884-1891 (1999) for the Library of America.
Besides his academic work, he writes a twice-monthly column for Al-Hayat and Al-Ahram; is a regular contributor to newspapers in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East; and is the music critic for The Nation. He has lectured at universities in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia; has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and Toronto; and delivered the inaugural set of Empson Lectures at Cambridge University, as well as a series of lectures at the Collège de France at the invitation of Professor Pierre Bourdieu. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, and the American Philosophical Society, he was a member of the PEN Executive Board until 1998, and President of the Modern Language Association for 1999. He has been awarded numerous prizes and honors, including 20 honorary doctorates from the University of Chicago, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Haverford College, Bir Zeit University, the University of Michigan, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Warwick, the University of Exeter, the National University of Ireland, University of Paris 7 - Denis Diderot, Institute of Social Sciences (The Hague), the American University of Beirut, the University of Aberdeen, and several others. In 1998, he received the Sultan Owais Prize for general cultural achievement, and in 1999, he became an Honorary Fellow of the Middle Eastern Studies Association and was awarded the first Spinoza Prize given in the Netherlands. As a musician, he has collaborated with Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a new production of Beethoven's Fidelio for which he wrote a new English text to replace the spoken dialogue; additionally, he conducted the West-Eastern Divan workshop with Daniel Barenboim for young Arab and Israeli musicians.

Professor Said has received several awards for his memoir, Out of Place including the 1999 New Yorker Book Award for Non-Fiction; the Year 2000 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction; the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award in Literature conferred by the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the 2001 Lannan Literary Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the 2002 Prince of Asturias Award for Concord. His most recent publications include The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (Vintage, 2000), Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Harvard University Press, 2001), Power, Politics and Culture (Pantheon, 2001), and Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (Pantheon, 2002).

In 2003 Edward Said has died aged 67 at a New York hospital. He had suffered from leukaemia since the early 1990s.