Life could be so easy for Daniel Barenboim if he just let it. The affable 68-year-old pianist and conductor - playing twice in Abu Dhabi with the Berliner Staatskapelle this week - has over six decades of public acclaim already behind him, so he could hardly be blamed for settling into a quiet late career. But while praise for his work continues to pile up, the Argentine-Israeli's working life in the 21st century has been anything but placid. Indeed, he seems almost allergic to taking the easy way out.
Take last month at La Scala in Milan, for example. In front of an audience that included Italy's President Giorgio Napolitano, Barenboim delayed a performance of Wagner's The Valkyries and read out parts of Italy's arts-friendly constitution as a protest against Italian government arts cuts.
He also leads the headline-grabbing West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, the ensemble containing musicians from across the Middle East's religious divides that he created with the Palestinian thinker Edward Said.
Meanwhile, his continuing criticism of Israeli government policy still makes his position in his home country especially tense, especially as some have not yet forgiven him for breaking Israel's unofficial ban on performing the anti-Semitic Wagner 10 years ago.
Could it be, perhaps, that he feels that some form of wider, semipolitical engagement is essential to his work? I put the question to him in a break from rehearsals for next week's concert.
"But I am not involved in politics!" is his answer. "I don't talk to prime ministers, to governments, I just operate as a citizen of a region that has seen so much suffering and bloodshed for so many years. It's only natural to do that. I have very little respect for people who don't care what is going on there - but this isn't political, it's human."
But didn't he once say that music was an expression of human ethics?
"Ah, that's different - and true. Music has to do with aesthetics, of course, that is obvious, but without ethics it is not art, not a truly human creation. There is a certain rigour that is part of ethics. You cannot play wilfully, you have to play with the brain, the heart and the stomach. Music is a creation of the human soul, but it is also a very physical thing, this is why it is also so strong."
So how does that connect to ethics exactly?
"I think the big lesson of music - and of life itself - is to learn to ask questions, the right questions: "Why this? What's the purpose of that? What comes afterwards?"
Barenboim has certainly had time to ask these questions himself. A child prodigy who made his concert debut in 1950, he was for long seen as the new youthful, unstuffy face of classical music. His 1967 marriage to the brilliant young British cellist Jacqueline du Pré made Barenboim half of classical music's number one golden couple, demonstrating to an eager public that brilliant maestros were not all stiff, elder-statesman figures stuck in the past. In more recent years (especially following du Pré's death from multiple sclerosis in 1987) he has become something of an elder statesman himself - albeit anything but stiff - leading some of the world's greatest orchestras and becoming a (partly reluctant) representative of music's conscience. It's inevitable that during such a long and varied career his attitudes to making music will have shifted.
"I have not managed to avoid getting older," he laughs. "I started performing music very young - at seven years old - and as a young man I always wanted to enjoy every single second of the music I played. I had to learn that you have to have the courage to sacrifice a momentary beauty to get something better overall. You have to follow the line of most, not least resistance. When players are very good, they are able to conquer that resistance and do something truly wonderful."
This insistence on restraint and taking the harder path, Barenboim says, should be evident in the Berliner Staatskapelle's performances of Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony and Mozart's 26th Piano Concerto (with Barenboim himself as soloist) this Friday.
"In [Tchaikovsky's] Fifth Symphony, there are dynamic markings almost on every note, and it can be tempting to play only for grand emotional gestures. It takes courage to know where to hold back. If you don't only play with high emotion, the piece has a lot more colour, and if you neglect to play some passages quietly, the piece also has a much narrower dynamic range."
Switching between the conductor's podium and the pianist's stool, as he will on Friday, is something Barenboim has long been adept at - his reputations in each field are arguably equal. He seems weary of being asked which role he prefers, but revels in the relative freedom of playing the piano, pointing out that a conductor cannot make an orchestra do anything if it doesn't want to. So how does he manage to persuade them?
"Well, this is my 20th season with the Staatskapelle - I am an open book to them, they know what I think. I also make a special effort to help educate the younger players to think in the same way. It's an orchestra's capacity to think alike that makes them great. They think about every phrase, where an accent should be, where absolutely no accent should be - these things are not written precisely and have to be interpreted."
While the Staatskapelle has become one of Europe's most intriguing orchestras since Barenboim took over in 1992 - preserving a uniquely central European sound that has disappeared elsewhere - this is its first visit to the Gulf.
Barenboim seems especially enthusiastic about the orchestra striking out into new territory: "I often enjoy playing more in places where people have heard less classical music, where they have less experience. They know it's something important and the quality of listening is often very good -much better than in New York, where some people in the audience are very serious but some have just come for a social occasion."
As someone who played the piano professionally at an age when most of us were still playing with toys, Barenboim is also passionately keen to get younger audiences listening to his music. This Saturday, the Staatskapelle's second concert - of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony - will be especially for young people and include an introduction to the music from Barenboim himself. But how can he help young people with little prior experience of classical music to get the most out of it?
"You can tell a young audience what listening to music is about: don't just let everything wash over you, don't wait for the magic - it won't come! Each person has to concentrate, to hold on to the first notes and travel with them and see where they go. Everyone has to make their own focus and not just be passive about listening."
While teenagers bored with the bitty pleasures of instant, bite-sized musical gratification might welcome the sustained, intricate joys of a Romantic symphony, Barenboim's ambition to help create a generation of careful listeners still seems like an uphill struggle. But a struggle, it seems, is not something he tends to shy away from.
Daniel Barenboim and the Berliner Staatskapelle will appear as part of the Abu Dhabi Classics season at the Emirates Palace hotel on Friday, followed by a Young People's Concert on Saturday. For more details see www.abudhabiclassics.com. Feargus O'Sullivan has also written for the Abu Dhabi Classics programme.
