No subject

that we both feel our identity comes from a place where we no longer 
live and this gives us a relative freedom. And yet we both feel 
connected to that place."

It was Said who introduced Barenboim to his Palestinian friends. "I 
think when he was growing up in Israel he never met a Palestinian, 
they may as well have been on the moon." He was impressed by 
Barenboim's openness. And it was Barenboim who helped provide Said 
with a new musical focus.

In 1999 they formed together an orchestra, The East West Divan, 
inviting musicians from the Middle East to come to Weimar to play 
together. The idea, Said says, "was to provide a symbolic meeting in 
the world of ideas and music. Not to find a solution, but to provide 
a metaphor quite removed from politics. We don't discuss politics or 
if we do it is just one person saying, 'I think this or that.'

"Music then became the common framework, the abstract language of 
harmony. "Both of us share the primacy of the aesthetic, both of us 
are interested in how you deal with aesthetics in the world." Of 
course it sounds impressive, this search for a mutual framework, 
harmony out of discord.

But Said and Barenboim also have in common a certain intransigence to 
the world, a lack of compromise. Both have made large gestures - Said 
in his politics, Barenboim in his music - that have attracted 
controversy and, you could say, work in the opposite direction from 
concord. Said is, of course, an outspoken critic of Arafat and the 
Oslo peace process. "I acknowledge Arafat's great achievement after 
1968 in putting together a Palestinian identity," he says, but on 
Oslo he remains unmovable.

"He gave them everything just to keep his power. It was the 
Palestinian Versailles. I have never forgiven him." Barenboim's 
position on Oslo is more tentative: "No matter what you think of the 
Oslo accord... it lost all chance of succeeding when the tempo, the 
speed at which it was proceeding, became so slow."

In their book, Said and Barenboim both argue the case for a lack of 
artistic compromise. But in the political world, Said's critics might 
say, he jeopardised the best they could get - Oslo - for a sort of 
perfectionism, an ideal good. And there may be some who will never 
forgive him.

The same could be said of Barenboim's decision to play Wagner in 
Jerusalem in 2000. That it was unnecessary, a grandstanding gesture, 
more likely to cause offence than to defend any principle - the 
artistic freedom to play what he chooses, where he chooses. "I don't 
have to play Wagner in Jerusalem, I can play my Wagner anywhere." So 
why did he?

He defends his decision: "Of course I understand that for some, 
Wagner evokes unbearable associations, I see that and I respect 
that." Those who don't want to hear it, he says, have the option to 
stay away. "I do not accept the fact that someone somewhere in their 
apartment suffers because Wagner is being played somewhere else." 
It's a fair point but it ignores the sensibility that would see 
Wagner not as complicit in the Holocaust - he was dead 50 years 
before the Nazis came to power - but complicit in the culture that 
produced Nazism. In history, some might say you don't become innocent 
just because you are dead - there is no neutral position.

The question of motivation will determine how the book is seen. 
Whether cynically, the "nattering" of two privileged intellectuals. 
Or optimistically, as people of good intent. In any conflict, on any 
side, there will be people of good will and people not of good will. 
And ultimately, how their dialogue, their unlikely friendship, is 
received will say more about us than it says about them

· Parallels & Paradoxes: Explorations In Music And Society, by Daniel 
Barenboim and Edward Said, is published by Bloomsbury, at £16.99.