BERLIN, Nov. 29 — Daniel Barenboim said he was flattered to be Lorin Maazel’s choice to pick up his baton at the New York Philharmonic, but, he said, “nothing could be further from my thoughts at the moment than the possibility of returning to the United States for a permanent position.”
With no offer, Daniel Barenboim asked, “Why should I say yes?”
The Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, where Daniel Barenboim has been general music director since 1992, is in need of renovation.
Speaking here on Wednesday, a day after Mr. Maazel unexpectedly endorsed him as his successor as music director, Mr. Barenboim said it would be inappropriate either to embrace or reject the proposal, since it was a suggestion by a colleague, not a formal offer by the board of the Philharmonic.
“Nobody has offered me the job, so why should I say yes or no?” Mr. Barenboim, the renowned conductor and pianist, asked in a telephone interview, sounding both tickled and troubled at being thrust onto the New York cultural stage.
Mr. Barenboim, who left the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in June after a 15-year run, said that Mr. Maazel had not consulted him before floating his name at a news conference. Still, Mr. Barenboim said, “it is very pleasant and flattering for a colleague to recommend me for his job after he leaves.” Mr. Maazel is scheduled to leave the Philharmonic at the end of the 2008-9 season.
As it happens, Mr. Barenboim, who discussed his current projects in an earlier interview on Monday at his office in Berlin, will be visiting New York often in the next few months.
In December he plans to bring his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which unites young Israeli and Arab musicians, for concerts at Carnegie Hall and the United Nations, where the orchestra will play in honor of the departing secretary general, Kofi Annan. It will also play in Chicago.
Then, on Jan. 20, Mr. Barenboim, 64, is to return to Carnegie Hall to give a piano recital, 50 years to the day after his debut there, as a teenage prodigy, playing for the conductor Leopold Stokowski.
Mr. Barenboim said he had initially balked at the timing of the concert, because it did not fit into his other trips to the United States. But then, he said, he got an offer he could not refuse from Carnegie Hall.
“They called to say, ‘Just for your information, in the whole history of Carnegie Hall, there is only one musician who played exactly 50 years to the date after his debut in the hall, and that was Vladimir Horowitz,’ ” he said, his eyes twinkling with delight. “ ‘Maybe you would like to reconsider.’ ”
Even without the touring schedule, life is hectic for Mr. Barenboim, an Argentine-born Israeli conductor whose projects reflect both his eclectic musical tastes and his deeply held political views.
Two weeks ago he received an award from the Jewish Museum of Berlin for fostering tolerance and understanding. He used his acceptance speech to renew his call for Israel to withdraw from the occupied West Bank, a stance that has put him at odds with other Jews.
“We have no right to occupy the land of others,” he said in his speech, “and we must find the intelligence and strength to fight for peace. And do so with at least twice the intensity as that with which we have waged war.”
The day he accepted the award, Mr. Barenboim said, he had engaged in peace-making of a different kind. The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit, had turned up for the ceremony, and he drew them into a private talk about the future of the Staatsoper Unter den Linden, where Mr. Barenboim has been general music director since 1992.
The chancellor and the mayor are clashing over who should pay for the opera company. Mr. Wowereit recently said that Berlin, which is struggling under a mountain of debt, could no longer afford it, and that the federal government should pick up the tab. The government flatly rejected that proposal.
“I’m always pressuring them to talk to each other,” Mr. Barenboim said. “They simply have to put all the elements on the table and discuss them. This will have an impact on the future of culture in Germany and on how German culture is viewed from outside the country.”
Mr. Barenboim has battled to secure financing for the Staatsoper almost since he came here. Though the opera plays to enthusiastic reviews and nearly full houses, it has lacked money in the years since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, leaving this reunified city with three opera houses.
On top of its operating costs, Mr. Barenboim said, the opera needed 150 million euros — close to $200 million — to renovate its Classicist building on Unter den Linden, the elegant promenade east of the Brandenburg Gate. It is rife with corroded pipes and water-damaged moldings.
“We are, as the Germans say, at five to 12 o’clock,” he said. “They realize that the situation is really dramatic, and that the federal government is the only influence that can, in some way, help out.”
Berlin has pledged not to close any of its three opera houses. The mayor recently named a new secretary for cultural affairs, André Schmitz, who said he was determined to find a solution that would maintain the Staatsoper at its current level of artistic accomplishment and satisfy Mr. Barenboim.
“The mayor and the city will do what it takes to keep Barenboim in Berlin,” Mr. Schmitz said.
For his part, Mr. Barenboim has tried not to add to the political tension. He has kept himself busy with rehearsals for a production of Ferruccio Busoni’s “Doktor Faust,” which has its premiere on Saturday.
Clearly weary of the money problems in Berlin, Mr. Barenboim prefers to discuss the West-Eastern Divan orchestra, a seven-year-old project that brings together young Israelis, Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese and Egyptians. It has played only once before in the United States — in 2001 in Chicago — so the New York concerts represent a major step.
The orchestra, Mr. Barenboim said, does not advocate any particular point of view in the political storms of the Middle East beyond the notion that all sides need to listen to each other better. “We are an N.G.O.,” he likes to say, “a nongovernmental orchestra.”
Yet playing at the United Nations is itself a political message, Mr. Barenboim acknowledged.
“The situation is beyond the point where it can be settled by the parties on their own,” he said. “It has to be the responsibility of the United Nations to find a way to solve this conflict that has cost so many lives.”
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