Daniel Barenboim was born in 1942 in Buenos Aires, where he gave his first public concert at the age of seven. He moved to Israel with his parents in 1952. At the age of 11, he participated in Igor Markevitch’s conducting classes in Salzburg, before going on to study harmony and composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. As a pianist and conductor, he has performed with virtually all major artists around the world. Chief conductor of the Orchestre de Paris from 1975 to 1989, he subsequently served as music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1991 to 2006 and held leading positions at Milan’s Teatro alla Scala between 2007 and 2014. He also regularly appeared at the Bayreuth Festival for almost two decades. From 1992 to 2023, he led Berlin’s Staatsoper Unter den Linden as general music director; the Staatskapelle Berlin appointed im chief conductor for life in 2000.

In 1999, Daniel Barenboim and Palestinian literary scholar Edward W. Said founded the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which brings together young musicians from Israel, Palestine, and other countries of the Middle East and Northern Africa with the goal of opening a dialogue between the different cultures of the region through the shared experience of music-making. The project led to the creation of the Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin, which began teaching activities in 2015. The Pierre Boulez Saal opened in the same building in 2017.

Daniel Barenboim was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He is a Knight Commander of the British Empire as well as a Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford. In 2007, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon named him a UN Messenger of Peace.