Divining Harmony The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra Performs Beethoven and Bruckner
Thomas May
On August 16, 1999, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra gave its very first concert in Weimar—a choice replete with symbolic associations not only on account of the city’s Goethe-linked legacy but also because Weimar had been chosen as that year’s European Capital of Culture. The orchestra’s co-founders, Daniel Barenboim and the late Edward W. Said, took its name from the title of a collection of poems that Goethe published 200 years ago in 1819, a lyrical model for dialogue between cultures. Turbulent changes in political, social, economic, and even climate-related conditions have since posed grave threats to this vision of harmony—a vision that embraces the striving to reach it—yet the principle of hope that Barenboim and Said foresaw would be embodied by the Divan remains powerfully inspiring—indeed, more necessary than ever. Ludwig van Beethoven, Goethe’s contemporary, has been a defining presence for the Divan’s identity from the start: the inaugural concert two decades ago culminated in his Seventh Symphony. On tonight’s program, for which Maestro Barenboim and the orchestra are joined by Anne-Sophie Mutter and Yo-Yo Ma—two globally celebrated musicians who, like the Divan and its home base, the Barenboim-Said Akademie, have made incalculable contributions to nurturing a new generation of artists—Beethoven’s music is combined with the final, unfinished statement by one of his greatest symphonic
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