Music has always been a lasting and essential part of my life. It is therefore only natural, I suppose, that my very earliest memories, from home in Buenos Aires, are musical ones. I was born in November 1942, and at the time Argentina had a vibrant, healthy cultural life. It was fairly informal, open to everyone, with regular house and chamber music concerts. It was perfect for adults and children alike. My parents were remarkable people. They were not affluent, by any standard, but they had a rich inner life. They were avid readers and immersed themselves in all aspects of philosophy and -culture. Every Sunday, my father and I went to the bookstore, a highlight of my week. Early on, I was interested in biographies, especially of musicians. Music was always a subject of conversation with both my parents and their friends.
I remember that everybody used to laugh because, as a small child, I thought that absolutely everyone played the piano. Both my parents taught the piano and therefore, outside of family, the only people that came to our house during the day were students and other pianists. I didn’t meet any people from the outside that didn’t play piano. People found this very funny, and I didn’t understand why. Music was all around me, after all. Instinctively, I understood music was a language I could communicate in, although I was not able to articulate that back then. Music was a serious matter, but it was above all an enormous source of joy for me.
I had initially wanted to play violin, because my father had performed a series of concerts with a violinist and I thought that, to play with Papa, I had to play the violin. But my parents could not find a violin small enough for me to play on. Even a 1/8 size was too big. I was four years old.
A few weeks or months later, I saw my father play concerts with another pianist. Another way to play with Papa! I remember thinking the piano was actually rather practical: it had its own legs to stand on, you did not have to hold it up. And so I started playing the piano at five and a half. My mother taught me as a beginner, then my father took over after a few months.
I met other children at the nursery. Later, at school, I realised they were not interested in music like I was, but that didn’t bother me; we played together nonetheless. I remember particularly enjoying football.
I grew up feeling like a perfectly normal child. I don’t remember thinking I was in any way different, and my parents never told me that I was. A slightly unusual hobby: I loved going to rehearsals in Buenos Aires. As a result, all the orchestra musicians knew me. Once, Adolf Busch came to conduct and the orchestra musicians told him that he had to listen to me. He asked me to play for him and I was only too happy. He asked me whether there were any musicians in my family, and I told him that both my mother and my father were. Busch then asked to meet my father and told him that he had an unusual son, and that he had to take special care of me. Yet I was never given the impression by my parents that I was in any way special.
I played my first public concert when I was seven years old. Word had gotten around and, on 19th August 1950, I was invited to play a recital at Sala Beyer. I remember that it felt perfectly natural; I was not nervous at all. And yet my feet barely touched the pedal! It dawned on me then that this was not what the other seven-year-olds did. I played whatever I was given to play; I don’t remember having particular likes or dislikes. That came much later. The music was cleverly chosen, I suppose.
It was in that very special musical scene of Buenos Aires where I encountered the one other child who also played the piano to the highest level: Martha Argerich. Her teacher, Vincenzo Scaramuzza, had also taught my father, which explains why we play in a very similar way, technically—although she is the much better pianist. I admired her from the moment I heard her play for the very first time. We met in the house of the Rosenthal family, who hosted house concerts every week. People came for the music and the famous apple strudel that Mrs Rosenthal baked. Martha was eight and I was seven, and we played games together underneath the grand piano. One day, the conductor Sergiu Celibidache was there. He asked us why we played underneath and not at the piano: he teased us and then we played for him, first Martha—who played the C-sharp minor étude by Chopin—then me.
When I was nine, my parents decided to relocate to the newly founded state of Israel. My maternal grandparents had been Zionists, not politically active, but still: for them it was natural that we should go to Israel now that it was a formal state, recognised by the UN. My father shared in the general feeling that we should go, also because the closer proximity to Europe meant that I would be able to have much more contact with the musical life there. My family was not wealthy, but an uncle had given my parents $300 to help us on our way.
The journey from Argentina to Israel was my first contact with some of the places that would become important centres of my later career. We left the day after the first lady Evita Perón died, on 27th July 1952—but our departure date was unrelated to that major date in Argentinian history. Although it was not articulated, it was clear that this was goodbye for good. I don’t remember being afraid, it seemed more of an adventure.
I was never given the impression by my parents that I was in any way special
In the days before the dawn of the jet age, the journey to Europe took an -excruciatingly long time. We travelled for three days, first by plane—a propeller plane, of course, with stops in Montevideo, São Paolo, Dakar, Cape Verde, Lisbon, Madrid and Rome—then by train. When we finally arrived in Salzburg I was completely exhausted. As we passed the Kleines Festspielhaus—now the House for Mozart—I noticed a poster announcing a performance of The Magic Flute. I asked my parents what it was about, and they explained that it was an opera by Mozart. Of course, there were no more tickets, but my mother, who was a very enterprising woman without the slightest hint of shyness, said I should try to get into the Kleines Festspielhaus on my own. Being the little boy that I was, I actually managed to sneak in unnoticed. I discovered an empty box where I took a seat like a little prince. The musicians tuned their instruments, the conductor stepped up to the podium—and I promptly fell asleep in the dark, cosy box. Sometime later, I woke up again and, not knowing where I was or where my parents were, I began to cry in my confusion. A steward rushed over and escorted me outside. That was the end of my little escapade.
All the same, I ended up meeting some of the world’s leading musicians in Salzburg over the years. It was a place to meet people who had known Brahms personally; the spiritual successors of the greatest musicians of the past were all there, witnesses to another era. I met and heard Edwin Fischer—a pianist who continues to inspire me to this day—and I myself played on Mozart’s spinet in his birthplace and gave a recital of Bach’s D-minor concerto as part of the final concert of Igor Markevitch’s conducting class in 1952. Markevitch had heard me in Buenos Aires and he was convinced then that I would become a conductor, because of my sense of rhythm. He was the one who had invited me to come to Salzburg, hence our little detour on the way to our new home in Tel Aviv.
From Salzburg we went to Vienna, where my father taught a class at the music academy. I played six concerts in Vienna, among them a recital and a concert with orchestra at the Konzerthaus, and a recital at the American embassy with a whole programme of American music. I was very happy about that; I loved to perform.
At the end of 1952, we returned to Rome and from there took the boat to Haifa to start our new life in Israel. When we arrived, my grandparents had already set up an apartment where we would live. My grandparents spoke Spanish and Yiddish; I only spoke Spanish and a few childish words of German I had picked up during my weeks in Austria. Naturally, the question of my further education loomed large. My parents spoke to the director of the school who explained to them that it was going to be impossible for me to follow the curriculum in Hebrew. I received private lessons in Hebrew in the afternoons and, little by little, I began to understand more.
It was a very exciting time; a new land, a new country with enormous significance for a Jewish family. I remember enjoying life, except for the language bit. I immediately found friends, something I imagine was much easier at that time than it would be today. I played a recital at the museum in Tel Aviv in January 1953, as well as an audition for the Israel Philharmonic. They invited me to perform at a concert—and who should be in the audience but David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister! An uncle of mine was a member of the socialist party Mapai, which was Ben-Gurion’s party. He had connections to the government and arranged for Ben-Gurion to come. I met him after the concert. He told my father we had to change our family name from “Barenboim” to “Agassi”, the Hebrew equivalent—both mean “pear tree”, from the Jewish “Birnbaum”. Ben-Gurion said that we would be ashamed bearing such an old Jewish name and needed a modern Hebrew one to reflect the modern state of Israel. He, too, had changed his name.
My father politely declined, but Ben-Gurion took a liking to me. The school I went to was around the corner from his residence, and he offered to let me practise there. Shimon Peres was his secretary, and he opened the door each time I went. I thanked Ben-Gurion profusely for allowing me to use the piano at his home. Was there anything I could do for him, I asked. Yes, he answered. He loved to read, including in languages he didn’t speak that well. One of his favourite books was Cervantes’ Don Quixote and, in a rather poetic arrangement, he asked me to read passages to him in Spanish.
I stayed in Israel from December 1952 until the summer of 1954, when we returned to Salzburg, this time to participate in Markevitch’s conducting classes. That summer, I also met Wilhelm Furtwängler, one of the most lasting influences of my musical life. I don’t know how it was arranged; I wish I knew. Even as a child I knew who Furtwängler was, having heard him in Buenos Aires conducting the St Matthew Passion in 1950. Naturally, it was something very special to be introduced to him.
Furtwängler was extremely nice. He asked me to play practically everything I could think of at that time, although it was difficult to communicate as I didn’t speak German and he didn’t speak Spanish and had little English. Through a translator, I told him that I had heard him in Buenos Aires. It was then he invited me to play with the Berlin Philharmonic. My father told him that this was the greatest compliment he could have given me, but asked him to understand that, as a Jewish family from Argentina on our way to Israel, he felt it was too soon for us to go to Germany, only nine years after the war. Furtwängler understood that and asked his secretary to phone all his colleagues who were in Salzburg to make time to listen to me.
I came home smelling of vodka and cigars. My father said, “Where in the hell have you been?”
Even as a small child I remember being confused by the fact that it was acceptable to be in Austria, where people also spoke German, but not to be in Germany. My father could not really answer this and it remained a very unclear subject for me, as it did for many people.
If Furtwängler was the conductor who influenced me the most, Arthur Rubinstein was the pianist. He knew my parents in Buenos Aires, where he would visit and I would play for him. By the time we were living in Israel, Rubinstein came to Tel Aviv to perform. I went to a rehearsal of his and he was very happy to see me, and he told me to come to his hotel on a Thursday so that I could play for him. When Thursday morning came, I woke up with a high fever and my mother told me that I couldn’t go to school or to see Rubinstein. I said not going to school was fine, but I had to see Rubinstein, I had to play for him. We argued back and forth and I won. But when I arrived at the hotel, Rubinstein and his family had left in the morning for an excursion to the Galilee and had not returned. I sat down and waited; I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t imagine that Rubinstein had not meant it when he had told me to come, or that he had forgotten me. I sat there for hours, miserable.
Then, at about 8.00pm, he and his family—his wife and two children—came into the lobby. He saw me, and I saw on his face a look of pain, of realisation that he had forgotten this poor boy. He apologised profusely, then added: “You don’t look well.” I told him I had a fever, and he told me I shouldn’t have come. But I told him I had to see him, I had to play for him, so we went upstairs to his room. I played for about an hour; Schubert, Liszt and Brahms. When I finished, at around 9.30pm, he told me I couldn’t go home yet, I had to stay and have dinner. I was elated; he was happy to see how I had developed.
I went downstairs to the restaurant with him and his wife and the children. He saw I still had a fever, and he said to me that there is only one thing I should do: have some vodka. So he gave me the first vodka of my life. And after dinner he gave me a Montecristo No. 3 Havana cigar. He said I should smoke it and that, with the vodka and the cigar, by tomorrow I would be fine. By the time I got home, it was 1.00am. I hadn’t phoned my parents. They were so worried, and I came home smelling of vodka and cigars. My father said, “Where in the hell have you been?” I said, “With Arthur Rubinstein.” It was a little difficult for them to believe. But that’s how I started smoking, and I’ve never stopped since.
Markevitch was also formative for me in many ways. Not only did he “spot” the conductor in me when I was a child, he also introduced my family to the teacher Nadia Boulanger. She lived on the sixth floor of an apartment block on Rue Ballu in Paris. She received us politely and asked me whether I was ready to play. When I said I was she told my father, still politely, that he had to remain outside. I played the Bach Italian concerto for her. When we came back out, she said some complimentary words to my parents and that it would be an honour for her to teach me. She taught me for a year and a half and would not take a penny for the lessons.
My father always wanted me to have another teacher next to him, as a security. He was concerned that he didn’t have a title and about whether he could take me far enough. Around the same time as our move to Paris, my father pestered Carlo Zecchi of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia to accept me in his class. Every three weeks, I would take the train from Paris to Rome with my mother. I, “Danielino,” as Zecchi called me, would play last and the other students were very pleasant to me. I was a happy child and a happy teenager, with an insatiable curiosity and the feeling of pure joy whenever I made music, a feeling that has never left me.
As I remember these early years, on my 80th birthday, they seem at once perfectly normal and extraordinary. I didn’t feel as young as I was then, nor do I feel as old as I am now. In retrospect, I understand how outlandish my experiences as a child must seem to anyone who has not lived them. To me, however, they are just my life. It felt normal; I cannot put it any other way. Through their love, care and wisdom, my parents instilled in me an innate sense of trust and confidence that has guided me throughout my life and career: growing up to become a young man travelling and performing alone; beginning to make a name for myself as a conductor; reasserting my being a conductor as well as a pianist.
Music has always been joy, never a duty—although I began to realise early on that there were certain things I had to do; for instance, take a shower before the concert, around 6.00pm. I’ve kept this tradition all my life. And this is how I have lived my life: in and through music.
