Daniel Barenboim

Daniel Barenboim was born in 1942 in Buenos Aires

Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires in 1942 to Jewish parents Aida and Enrique Barenboim, both pianists. His mother began teaching him piano at age 5, and his father then became his teacher. He gave his first concert in Buenos Aires in 1950.

In 1952 the family moved to Israel, and he attended Tichon Hadash high school in Tel Aviv. In 1954 he joined Igor Markevitch's conducting classes in Salzburg and met Wilhelm Furtwängler. In 1955 he studied harmony and composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.

He performed in Vienna and Rome in 1952 and later toured widely. He was music director of the Orchestre de Paris from 1975 to 1989 and of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1991 to 2006. From 1992 he led the Berlin State Opera and the Staatskapelle Berlin, and he became music director of La Scala in 2011.

In 1999 he founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra with Edward Said, bringing together Israeli and Arab musicians. He married cellist Jacqueline du Pré in 1967 and pianist Elena Bashkirova in 1988. He holds Argentine, Israeli, Palestinian and Spanish citizenship and is a critic of Israeli policy on the Palestinian issue.

He resigned from the Berlin State Opera in January 2023 for health reasons. In 2025 he announced that he has Parkinson's disease.