"'Moonlight' and Mendelssohn in the West Bank" is the title of an article (labeled "Ramallah Journal") by Serge Schmemann in the 11 September 2002 New York Times (page A4). It tells of a musical performance, controversial in the local political context, that Daniel Barenboim gave on an old piano for a few hundred Palestinian students the day before.

This clipping has followed me around for the past month because of two simple, brilliant, thoughtful comments that it contains. Schmemann quotes Barenboim:

Each one of us has a responsibility to do what is right, and not to wait for others to do it. My way is music. What I can do is play music for you, and maybe this way, in a very small way for these few moments, we are able to build down the hatred that is so much in the region.

and

I'm not a politician. I don't have a plan to end the conflict. But I think the lesson we have to learn from the 20th century is that every human being — small, young as you or older like I — has to think of his responsibility as a human being and not always depend on the politicians and the governments.

(see also perhaps BlameStorming (15 May 1999), FreeAction (3 Apr 2000), SimplyGoodHearted (25 Apr 2002), FiveOh (29 Sep 2002), ...)

TopicLife - TopicSociety - TopicProfiles - 2002-10-09

(correlates: PianoRecital, CriminalBehavior, ProtoProtagonism, ...)