Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

A few years ago I was driving on a freeway in France and turned on the radio, chancing on France-Culture. (In passing it is fair to note the abundance of quality programs on that station. It has its share of empty Parisian intellectual chit-chat but much of the time I learn something interesting.) I was lucky: it was the start on a long discussion with Daniel Barenboim. Ever since, I have wanted to listen to it again but had forgotten the details, including the name of the program. I did remember that at some point the interviewer had found Barenboim in his hotel room, smoking a cigar and rooting for Argentina in its game against Switzerland at the beginning of the FIFA World Cup  it almost won; the latter detail helped find the date (thanks, Wikipedia) and, from it, the recording: here for part 1 and there for part 2.

On the side (again), Barenboim’s French is amazing. Even more so that YouTube has a multitude of interviews of him in just as seemingly perfect Italian, German, Spanish (his native language) and English,  and he is also fluent in Hebrew. Hearing him in French, one needs a while to realize that he is not a native speaker; his almost imperceptible accent could be just from some province. At some point he reveals himself through a trifling mistake that a French person would normally not make, like using “opéra” in the feminine as in Italian. (As an aside in the aside, I may be deluding myself in thinking that by default native French speakers know the word “opéra”, other than maybe as the moniker for a metro station in Paris. For one thing, under-40 Italians I meet usually know the latest Taylor Swift “song” but could not name a single Rossini aria, assuming they have even heard the name “Rossini”, other than maybe as the moniker for a meat dish. But let us not get dejected.) Ignoring these rare and small slips his French is elegant if slightly passé (who says “peu importe” nowadays?).

(For an earlier article in this blog involving Barenboim — as well as Arthur Rubinstein — see here.)

The most fascinating part of the interview is the beginning, where the interviewer quizzes him on Mozart, of whom Barenboim is one of the best performers in modern times. He quotes Arthur Schnabel:  “Mozart is too easy for children and too hard for adults”. (Schnabel’s actual  quip has “artists” for “adults” and there is this variant:  “Children are given Mozart because of the small quantity of the notes; grown-ups avoid Mozart because of the great quality of the notes”.) Professional artists, explains Barenboim, strive to reconcile the depth that they now perceive with the naïve pleasure they were  finding in the same music as children. Mozart’s music “weeps when it laughs and laughs when weeping”. Barenboim has this formula, which would be worth a treatise: Mozart’s music is “horriblement transparente”, horribly transparent.

Later in the recording he states that the 20^th century distinguished itself by a tendency to deconstruction and fragmentation, and expresses the hope that the 21^st will reconstruct and reunify. It is not taking that road.

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