Daniel Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires in 1942 from parents of Jewish Russian descent. He started piano lessons at the age of five with his mother, continuing to study with his father who remained his only other teacher. In August 1950, when he was only seven years old, he gave his first official concert in Buenos Aires.
Important influences in his development as a musician included Artur Rubinstein and Adolf Busch, both of whom performed in Argentina. The Barenboim family moved to Israel in 1952. In 1955 the young Daniel Barenboim studied harmony and composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris.
Barenboim made his debut as a pianist in Vienna and Rome in 1952. From then on, he made annual concert tours of the United States and Europe, he toured Australia in 1958 and soon became known as one of the most versatile pianists of his generation.

In the same period, Barenboim began to devote more time to conducting. His close relationship with the English Chamber Orchestra which began in 1965 lasted over a decade. Between 1975 and 1989 he was Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris.
Barenboim continues to appear as a regular guest conductor with the Berlin Philharmonic and Vienna Philharmonic orchestras. In 2006 he was named Maestro Scaligero at La Scala, Milan.
In addition to Barenboim’s indisputable musical authority, he has become increasingly vocal in non-musical issues over the years. In the early 1990s, a chance meeting between Barenboim and the late Palestinian-born writer and Columbia University professor Edward Said in London led to an intensive friendship that has had both political and musical repercussions. They decided to collaborate on musical events to further their shared vision of peaceful co-existence in the Middle East. This led to Barenboim's first concert on the West Bank, a piano recital at the Palestinian Birzeit University in February 1999. It also led to a workshop for young musicians from the Middle East that took place in Weimar, Germany, in August 1999: this group was to become the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. Recently he has been nominate Ambassador for Peace by the General Secretary of United Nations Ban Ki Moon.
Mr. Barenboim is keen to draw young people to music, believing in the transformative power of music. Mr. Barenboim is the author of A Life in Music and Everything is Connected (US title: Music Quickens Time). He is the co-author of Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society, a series of conversations between Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said, and Dialoghi su musica e teatro: Tristano e Isotta with Patrice Chéreau, a lengthy dialogue on the relationship between stage director and conductor in the production of the opera Tristan und Isolde.