What we remember of him are the Beethoven sonatas, the Wagner operas, the three complete Bruckner cycles, the almost philosopher-pianist of the Mozart piano concertos. The collective imagination has, over time, settled on a single figure: Daniel Barenboim, custodian of the great Germanic repertoire, heir to Furtwängler, a Mozartian by election. That image, accurate but incomplete, has obscured one of the most singular dimensions of his career — a commitment of nearly fifty years to the music of his own time, whose coherence is matched only by its media discretion. More than thirty world and American premieres at the head of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra alone; two operas premiered in Berlin; commissioned symphonies in Paris and Chicago: few purely interpretive conductors of his stature have, over nearly half a century, integrated the music of their time as a structural component — rather than a decorative one — of their leadership of three great orchestras directed in succession.
Two dates are enough to grasp its scope. Paris, Palais des Congrès, June 18, 1980: the Orchestre de Paris gives the world premiere of Pierre Boulez's Notations I–IV, a commission from its principal conductor to the composer who, against all expectation, agreed then to take up piano miniatures from his youth and turn them into a monumental orchestral work. Chicago, Orchestra Hall, January 14, 1999: the same conductor premieres Notation VII with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, nineteen years after the first four, on two continents and under the same founding gesture. The adventure of the orchestral Notations — left unfinished at Boulez's death in 2016 — would probably never have existed without that initial commission. The thread runs through Barenboim's entire career.
Paris, 1975–1989: the shaping of a taste
Appointed at 33 to succeed Solti, Barenboim undertook at the Orchestre de Paris the longest tenure the ensemble has ever known, along with a contemporary-programming policy of rare coherence. The record speaks for itself: several world premieres — Pierre Boulez's Notations I–IV (Palais des Congrès, June 18, 1980), Edison Denisov's Symphony No. 1 (a commission for the orchestra's twentieth anniversary, 1987), Hans Werner Henze's Fandango, Jacques Lenot's Pour mémoire III — and a systematic body of French premieres, notably of Henze and Lutosławski. To which is added a sustained engagement with the great voices of the late twentieth century: Berio, Xenakis, Dutilleux. No spectralists; Barenboim's "Parisian" modernity is deliberately international and embraces an editorial parity among Central Europe, France, and Germany. Boulez is not merely a composer performed: he is, by Barenboim's own account, the initiator who revealed Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern to him, and a regular institutional partner — the two-orchestra concerts bringing together the Orchestre de Paris and the Ensemble intercontemporain established a circulation between repertoire and new music that existed nowhere else on such a scale.
Three discographic milestones fix this period. The coupling of Notations 1–4 / Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna / Messagesquisse by Boulez, released on Erato, records the premiere of the Notations — a founding gesture whose importance is not always appreciated: it is Barenboim, not Boulez, who premieres Boulez's pieces orchestrally. The composer-conductor chose a relay interpreter, in the house that was then defending contemporary French music most systematically. The Symphonies No. 1 and No. 2 Le Double by Dutilleux, recorded in 1988 for Erato, place Barenboim in the lineage of Munch and durably install the composer in the great twentieth-century orchestral repertoire, at a moment when his work was far from canonized. Finally, Denisov's Symphony No. 1, recorded on Erato in 1991, documents a commission whose significance owes as much to the quality of the work as to the figure of its author — the most Francophile of the Russian composers of his generation, settled in Paris at the end of his life, and today, sadly, quite forgotten.
The abrupt departure from the Opéra-Bastille in 1989 — Pierre Bergé dismissing the conductor a few months before the inauguration — closes this Parisian sequence on a rupture whose cultural reckoning has never truly been drawn.
