I was backstage in the canteen at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, killing
time before taking my seat for a five-hour performance of Wagner’s Tristan
und Isolde, and Daniel Barenboim was calmly asking David Chan, the Met
concertmaster, to lend me his violin during the first intermission so I
could audition for him. Ha, ha, ha. It was like one of those dreams where
you’re in an exam stark naked. Except — help — it was really happening.
With a thousand panicked thoughts flashing through my mind — “Should I tell
him that the last time I picked up a fiddle was to do backing strings on The
X Factor?” — I somehow grasped that I was being given a once-in-a-lifetime
chance to play for one of the world’s greatest living conductors. I mustn’t
blow it.
We’d met when I presented the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra Prom last year;
Barenboim found out that I worked a lot with musicians in the West Bank and
asked me to talk to him about it. Somehow he’d discovered I was also a
violinist and decided I needed to come on tour to learn more about his
orchestra, which brings Jewish and Arab musicians together to make music at
the very highest level, despite their political differences. “So long as
you’re not a fake,” he had said with a wink.
Which is how I found myself in his dressing room at the Met during the first
interval of Tristan. While all of New York’s musical glitterati clamoured to
see him, I stood there clutching a borrowed violin with sweaty palms,
wondering how on earth I was going to pull this off.
Three weeks later, on January 9, 2009, I was in Berlin — much to the surprise
of the orchestra, who were evidently not used to playing with random and
conspicuously blonde British impostors. I contemplated trying to pass myself
off as, say, a Russian Israeli (my great-grandparents were Jews from
Belarus) but decided against it. After all, as my Israeli oboist roommate,
Meirav, sweetly reminded me: “The whole point of this orchestra is it
doesn’t matter where you’re from.”
Minah, a fellow violinist from Egypt, also helpfully pointed out that since it
was Britain’s fault that Israel and Palestine were in this mess in the first
place, it was probably no bad thing for me to be there representing the
original catastrophe of the Balfour declaration. Great, I thought, so now
I’m an enemy, too: this must be what is meant when people speak of the
orchestra’s insistence on equality in action.
My initial anxiety at the first rehearsal dissipated when I realised the Divan
was, in many ways, an orchestra like any other: the brass section are the
noisiest, brashest, most laddish and the last to leave the bar; the poor
viola players get the mickey taken out of them by everyone else. Even in the
bitterest of regions, musical stereotypes apparently transcend borders. In
another sense, of course, it’s an orchestra quite unlike any other, as the
news coming out of Gaza reminded us daily.
“Does it make sense for us to be meeting here together like this?” Barenboim
wondered one morning before rehearsal at the Berliner Staatsoper. “Well, in
the end there is no need for this orchestra if there is no problem in the
Middle East: precisely when it is difficult is when we have to stick
together, to do what we do. There has been nothing new about the political
situation in decades; it is a vicious cycle of reaction after reaction,
leading to ever more bloodshed. Something else needs to be tried.”
That “something else” is the basis for the experiment he dreamt up with Edward
Said, the late Palestinian academic, exactly 10 years ago, to bring together
musicians from Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Egypt every
summer. While there are as many opinions about the situation in the Middle
East as there are members of the orchestra — and trust me, their raucous
debates frequently last into the small hours — at the core of this society,
this “family”, is a belief held sacred. Not that the project will bring
peace to the Middle East (nobody is so naive) but that decades of
unremitting grief have proved there can be no military solution to the
conflict in Israel-Palestine and therefore another way of thinking about a
possible solution must be found.
One such model would involve dialogue, equality and respect, and the symphony
orchestra is a metaphor for this. You cannot function within it as an
individual; the voices of your neighbours must not only be listened to but
accepted, respected, or you yourself will not survive long. “And we know
that is our future,” Barenboim insists. “To be in some form of co-operation
together, side by side.”
Not that harmony always prevails. When Barenboim describes the group as a
“family”, he means it: off stage, they are noisy, rambunctious, human. They
yell, they laugh, they fall in and out of love. After 10 years they know one
another horribly well. And behind every in-joke, every nickname, every love
affair lies the terrible truth that the Divan is the only place where they
can all peacefully coexist.
As Barenboim joked in Salzburg last week: “Why am I doing this? Not because I
need the work, I promise you.” No. He and the orchestra believe “the
futility of the other approaches has gone on too long”; the world needs to
“think about a future that is different from how it has always been”. And
the Divan, in its own small way, contributes to that discourse. I have heard
dozens of the musicians, every one of whom must override national and family
loyalties to participate, talk of how it has changed their lives.
It certainly changed mine. In Moscow, Barenboim took me to lunch after a
rehearsal and fed me borscht and vodka. “Vodka?” I said, faltering, feeling
a bit like the girl in the Malteser commercial. “Before a performance?” I
pointed out that if I messed up the Schoenberg later, I could blame him, at
which point he promptly ordered another round.
Barenboim does not believe that music exists outside life: it is, he insists,
not an escape from life but intimately connected to everything in it. (Of
course, the Variations for Orchestra went triumphantly that night:
everything is connected, it seems — even Beluga vodka and serialism.)
Although to hear him talk about music is breathtaking, a rehearsal with him
is not simply a masterclass in music. It will be a history lesson, a
politics lesson, a philosophy lesson, a literature lesson, delivered in a
smorgasbord of English (the default language of the orchestra), German,
Spanish, French, Italian, Russian, Hebrew and even a smattering of Arabic.
He often sits up smoking cigars with members of the orchestra until the early
hours; talking, arguing, imagining the possibility of the future.
That, finally, is the messy magic of the West-Eastern Divan. “Listen,”
Barenboim tells the ensemble before a concert at La Scala. “You’re a
wonderful orchestra and I’m not the worst conductor in the world, but
there’s a reason why we announce a concert and it sells out instantly. We
stand for a unique message in today’s world. There are so many messages of
hate out there; you come because you do not hate. We coexist on stage: we do
not hate.”
The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra will perform Proms 48 and 49 on Friday and
Prom 50 on Saturday, plus a Proms Intro on Saturday at 2.30pm. More
information at www.bbc.co.uk/proms
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