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BIOGRAPHY| MUSIC| NON-FICTION

Daniel Barenboïm is a living legend in the musical field. Born in Buenos Aires in 1942, he gave his first piano recital at the age of 7. Today, at the age of 72, he is the most acclaimed conductor worldwide.

Daniel Barenboïm’s pathway is one of a virtuoso. At the age of 12, the conductor and composer Wilhelm Furtwägler invited him to play a concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic. However, thinking it is too soon after the Second World War for a young Jewish boy to be performing in Germany, his father refused to let him go. Championed by the great pianist Albert Rubinstein, he started a soloist career across the world. After marrying the cellist Jacqueline du Pré in Jerusalem during the Six-Day War, he became music director of the Orchestre de Paris, and then of the Chicago Symphonic Orchestra. He has been the music director of the Staatskapelle Berlin for the past 25 years.

Citizen of the world (the United Nations named him Messenger of Peace), Daniel Barenboïm originated numerous projects with strong artistic and political impacts: the creation in 1999 of the West-Easter Divan Orchestra – a youth orchestra for Israeli and Arabic musicians from the Middle East, the Bayreuth Festival, several music schools, a new auditorium in Berlin (the Pierre Boulez Saal), a YouTube recording company. He even conceived a new piano with straight parallel strings instead of diagonal-crossed ones (“the Barenboïm”).

A legendary conductor, Daniel Barenboïm has been on stage almost every day for the past 70 years. This benchmark biography, built around many interviews and conversations with his close friends and collaborators, archived documents and unpublished letters, pays tribute to the man and to his work.

Born in 1943, Myriam Anissimov wrote for Le Monde for more than 10 years. She wrote many novels and biographies, among which Primo Levi (30,000 copies sold) and Romain Gary (25,000 copies sold). She discovered, published and wrote the foreword for Irène Némirosvsky’s previously unreleased manuscript Suite française. Her work was translated and sold in several foreign countries (the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, Germany, Italy, Israel and Spain).