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Mozart Leaps Perilous Hurdles to Reach an Audience in Gaza

Daniel Barenboim brought musicians from European orchestras to the Mathaf Cultural House in Gaza on Tuesday for a free concert.Credit...Pool photo by Mohammed Abed/Reuters

GAZA — The program was perfectly normal: a pair of beloved Mozart chestnuts (“A Little Night Music” and the G minor Symphony), before a lunchtime crowd in a local cultural center.

But the concert could hardly have been more out of the ordinary. Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli conductor, led an orchestra of two dozen elite musicians — volunteers from the Berlin Philharmonic, the Berlin Staatskapelle, the Orchestra of La Scala in Milan, the Vienna Philharmonic and the Orchestre de Paris — into Gaza on Tuesday. They played, on a makeshift stage, with obvious emotion and exceptionally well, before an invited audience of several hundred that rose to cheer not just afterward but also from the moment the players walked into the hall.

“This is meant to demonstrate European solidarity with Gazan civil society,” Mr. Barenboim said in an interview beforehand, careful to separate the event from the militant Palestinian group Hamas, the ruling authority in Gaza, whose involvement was kept to an absolute minimum.

With the orchestra waiting late the night before in nearby El Arish just across the Egyptian border, Hamas officials, fractious as always, almost derailed the entire undertaking, insisting it would somehow be interpreted as a celebration of Osama bin Laden’s killing, which the leader of the Hamas government, Ismail Haniya, had just publicly condemned.

But in the end, after backstage arm-twisting by some local United Nations representatives, Hamas agreed not to interfere and had no visible presence at the performance.

Organized under the auspices of the United Nations, the free concert instead demonstrated the volcanic changes overtaking this region. Just weeks ago such an enterprise would have been unthinkable. Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel were shut tight. But the concert came amid talk by the new authorities in Egypt about permanently reopening the border crossing at Rafah; and at the same time as an Egyptian-brokered pact between Hamas and Fatah — the Palestinian faction heading the West Bank — which promises further easing of Gaza’s longtime isolation.

Gazans themselves clearly received this concert as one of the most tangible signs yet of change.

For the occasion Egypt agreed to open not just the Rafah border to let the orchestra into Gaza but also the airport in El Arish, a bygone hub of Palestinian travel, long shut to commercial traffic. Under a bright, cloudless blue sky, a convoy of white United Nations vehicles, some armored, their blue flags flapping, picked up the players at the crossing and drove them past waving teenagers on rubble-strewn sidewalks and old men riding donkey carts over shattered streets.

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Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli conductor, leading the orchestra in Gaza on Tuesday for an audience of several hundred.Credit...Adel Hana/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images

A crush of security forces, television cameras and well-dressed Gazans greeted the players at the Mathaf Cultural House in Gaza City. A seaside oasis of recent construction amid the territory’s endless devastation, it houses a privately financed museum of local archaeological artifacts, a restaurant and a large banquet hall where a stage draped with fabric had been assembled under chandeliers and a bank of theatrical lights as if for a wedding.

Older Gazans, several fighting back tears, said they could not remember anything like this: a group of world-famous musicians coming to give a concert here. Just getting by is a daily struggle for Gazans. Culture of this sort, which people elsewhere take for granted, has long been unthinkable. For a generation or two of younger Gazans, the mere sight of Mr. Barenboim marked a first: He was the first Israeli many of them had ever encountered who was not toting a rifle or riding in an Apache helicopter.

“Our job is to bring things in and out of Gaza, but we have never brought music,” said Filippo Grandi, the commissioner general of the United Nations Relief and Welfare Agency, when he greeted the players and Mr. Barenboim at Rafah. Eight young children from a local music academy, stiffly concentrated before their instruments, had assembled in the waiting lounge there to play traditional Palestinian music as a welcome.

“You are giving us all a big gift,” Mr. Grandi said, “and the people of Gaza don’t receive many gifts these days.”

Representatives from Mr. Grandi’s agency and also from the Office of the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process worked with local nongovernmental organizations on the concert’s logistics. They invited women’s groups, businessmen and music students. The event was announced only a day or two beforehand, for security reasons and because, like anything else that involves getting into or out of Gaza, it was touch and go to the end. Mr. Barenboim’s foundation paid for the cost of jetting the musicians to Gaza.

A threat from an Islamic extremist group in Gaza, received by United Nations officials during the middle of the Mozart symphony, forced a hasty exit by the players after some post-concert speeches. Crestfallen children waited in vain for autographs. The sight of players hurrying past them was heartbreaking. The orchestra swept back to Rafah and reboarded its plane for Berlin on Tuesday, with a stopover in Vienna: 40 hours of travel, as it turned out, for not quite an hour of music.

But no one complained.

“This represents a new beginning, a brighter future, for Gazans to be accepted by the international community,” is how Faysal Shawa, a 43-year-old Gazan businessman, saw the concert. “It means people still believe in us. You start with music, and end up with acceptance.”

Raji Sourani, a Gazan lawyer, watched in amazement as a troupe of Gazan schoolgirls in crisp striped blue smocks and sneakers filed into the hall before the concert. “Look!” he cried. “In Gaza! After all these years of bloodshed and humiliation, now we see there is still the hope of solidarity.”

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Mr. Barenboim with a Palestinian boy who performed upon his arrival.Credit...Shareef Sarhan /United Nations, via European Pressphoto Agency

Mr. Barenboim, Argentine-born, a lightning rod in Israel who has long been an outspoken critic of Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories, holds Palestinian as well as Israeli citizenship and founded an orchestra of young Israeli and Arab players, the West-Eastern Divan. He recalled on the trip into Gaza having proposed the idea of a Gaza concert when he met the new Palestinian ambassador to Germany, Salah Abdel Shafi, at the end of March. Israeli officials rejected the same idea when he brought it up a year ago.

Mr. Shafi approached his Egyptian counterpart in Berlin, who offered to help. Surprised and delighted, Mr. Barenboim then wrote to Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary general, who also endorsed the plan. At that point Mr. Barenboim enlisted players from the orchestras that he regularly conducts.

Mr. Shafi came to see the orchestra off from Tegel airport in Berlin on Monday morning.

“Young Gazans only see the West through cheap Hollywood films,” he said. “So how can they be expected to be citizens of the world, if they are not exposed to another view?”

Felix Schwartz, a violist in the orchestra, spoke for other players when he added that making music, and by extension listening to others make music, means “putting aside whatever differences you have to do the same thing in the same place at the same moment.”

Orchestral music requires “an interrelationship of elements, a balance, with no one instrument having the main voice all the time,” Mr. Barenboim elaborated. “Even musically noneducated people can feel this inherent quality of justice and rationality.”

Proof came in Gaza when the orchestra landed in the El Arish airport Monday afternoon. While Egyptian agents slowly processed the players’ passports, Mr. Barenboim proposed an impromptu rehearsal in the long-disused waiting lounge. Two dozen of the world’s greatest musicians suddenly set themselves up on dusty metal benches near the bathrooms, under glum signs about not transporting dangerous materials. The sound of Mozart warmed the empty room. Airport workers gathered, including a beaming young man in a brown T-shirt and jeans who installed himself a foot or so away from a briefly startled Mr. Barenboim.

Then further proof came in Gaza, where the most extraordinary feature of the concert was the brief normalcy it brought to a desperate corner of the world.

Jawdat Khoudary, who founded Al-Mathaf, the cultural center that hosted the event, could barely contain his joy, not least at the sight of his daughter giving Mr. Barenboim a ceremonial gift of Palestinian cymbals after the performance.

“For one hour or so we listen to music like the rest of the world,” he said. “It’s an acknowledgment that we are normal people, that our interests are the same as anyone else’s in the world, that our dreams are the same, and that we want to create beauty again in Gaza. Culture has no borders, no limits.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Mozart Leaps Perilous Hurdles To Reach an Audience in Gaza. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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