Arts & International Affairs: Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer/Autumn 2018 | Page 58

THE BARENBOIM CASE: HOW TO LINK MUSIC AND DIPLOMACY STUDIES
mutual criminalization of any form of collaboration between Israel and most of the Arab
states, the Syrian and Iranian authorities exerted explicit bans on some orchestra musicians
to take part in the WEDO workshops; the oboist Mohamed Saleh Ibrahim even
lost his teaching position at the national conservatory in Cairo as well as a scholarship
from the Egyptian government after taking the risk to participate in spite of the contact
ban that was declared during the Second Intifada (Cheah 2009:198). The history of the
Divan is not least a narrative of cancelled, postponed, or relocated performances: envisaged
to take place in the 6,000-seat Roman Amphitheatre of Amman, Jordan, a concert
was cancelled for security reasons�just a month before, a suicide attacker had shot at
the public and musicians from the Amman Symphony Orchestra in same location�and
transformed into a “accustomed” musical contribution to the Ravello Festival on Italy’s
Amalfi Coast (Cheah 2009:239f.); security concerns were also the reason to adjourn
performances planned for Egypt and Qatar in the context of renewed violent escalation
of the conflict between the Hamas and Israeli forces in Gaza 2008. His ambitious project
to go on tour to Tehran with the Staatskapelle Berlin (under the patronage of the then
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier) proved unrealizable in 2015: in this
case, the governments of Israel and Iran appeared united in public outrage, the former
denouncing Barenboim for “using culture as a platform for his anti-Israel political views,”
the latter refusing to grant entry to any representative of a presumed “illegitimate regime”
(Huggler 2015). In a similar vein, Barenboim’s 75 th birthday celebrations remained completely
uncommented if not ignored by Israeli government officials (Mandel 2017).
Furthermore, as underlined by musicologist Beckles Willson, there are clear disparities
in the perceptual patterns about one and the same musical performance. Taking the example
of the concert given in Madrid by the Divan in 2006 during Israel’s war against the
Hezbollah, she points to a tension in the way in which was attributed a specific meaning:
for the local Spanish population, the concert reflected an anti-war sentiment resonating
with the end of the country’s military engagement in Iraq, but the concert also embodied
a public platform for a small group of Palestinian and Lebanese demonstrators, or
even recalled the medieval era of religious tolerance in Spanish history for others (Beckles
Willson 2009a).
(2) Questions of repertoire: the prevalence of Western art music. In addition, the
repertoire remains highly selective. Whereas the very name of the orchestra symbolically
suggests a space of encounters between East and West (thus following J. W. Goethe’s
poetry collection of the same title, the West-östlicher Divan), the performed works are
exclusively part of the Western musical tradition�a highly standardized repertoire that
encompasses the canonical symphonic works from Beethoven to Mahler, including the
oeuvre of classical modernism, Pierre Boulez, or the contemporary German composer
Jörg Widmann (now professor at the Barenboim–Said Academy). New trends have been
set from 2013 onwards, when Barenboim started to integrate commissioned works from
contemporary composers with Middle Eastern background, a series that began with Jordanian-born
German composer Saed Haddad’s Que la lumière soit and Israeli composer
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