Parallels and Paradoxes: explorations in music and society, by Daniel Barenboim and Edward W Said

When a great conductor-pianist and a leading literary intellectual talk music, does harmony or discord follow? Peter Porter overhears a duet that reveals the gap between notes and words

Daniel Barenboim tells Edward Said something which Said believes perhaps less completely than he does: "Music is different from the written word because music only exists when the sound is created." Throughout the discussions in this book, Barenboim's statement is elaborated, opposed, annotated and despaired of. I think any literary person, confronting a practical musician, will recognise he/she is going to be at the wrong end of the pecking order. Today, music eats the other arts. We are far from the time of the Florentine Academy; nobody would say that Verdi's music is just to heighten the effect of Piave's words.

Barenboim states at one point, "You cannot get to metaphysics without having gone through physics first,'' and Said emphasises "the gradual self-sufficiency of music and of the performing occasion, at a remove from the patrons and even the audience''. No question of who's boss.

Though Said is the professional intellectual, the best bits of metaphysics in these animated discussions, conducted in New York in the Nineties, come from Barenboim, a rare practical musician who thinks about the effect of music on its listeners. Said often refers to literary and philosophical parallels but these seem otiose. Both music and literature are governed by time (one thing after another), but literature has no need of the intervention of a performer.

When Said brings in King Lear or Othello, it is the text for reading he means and not the play for acting. Similarly, Barenboim's frequent obiter dicta about orchestral matters (he returns often to the instrumentation of the introduction to Beethoven's Fourth Symphony) don't arise from a reading of the score but from the realisation of its notes in performance. Music will accept the homage of words but, in association with them, will be as oil to water.

One of the curses of translating poetry from one language to another is the goodwill involved – the intention can readily be taken for the achievement. I felt the same disquiet reading these serious and heartfelt conversations. Agreement is not so much arrived at as devoutly to be wished.

What impresses the reader familiar with the music in question are the practical insights into its production, as when Barenboim is invited to reflect on literal observance of the score – Toscanini supposedly the literalist and Furtwängler the romantic interpreter – and explains that "literal'' means you do all that is written, not just follow the easily recognisable demand, the tempo.

He insists the conductor must pursue the line of most, not least, resistance. Similarly, both men are doubtful of the concept of "authentic'', the present-day original instrument cult. Every performance style, including any sort of authenticity, is only another style.

It is here that the two reach their best accord: music, like every art, must be remade in each generation, and Beethoven's aspiration is what matters, not a scholar's claim to have unearthed the tradition of performance in Beethoven's time. Yet the past remains the staple occupation for Barenboim as much as for Said.

Beethoven's is the dominant (yes, a pun) presence in these pages. At times, I felt I was back in the days when that one name produced the greatest hush: when idealising hair-ruffled portraits of the scowling genius were unavoidable logos for musical profundity. Barenboim and Said range over only the period from Bach to the 20th century, the epoch of symphony orchestras. I should have appreciated some examination of whether insights which fit Beethoven and his contemporaries apply also to, say, Josquin des Prez; whether, in fact, romantic striving can be felt in music before the establishment of what we call the tonal system.

Barenboim promotes post-Wagnerian, even post-Schoenbergian modernism, but is ready to admit that audiences are still uncomfortable with it. His championing of Birtwistle and Elliott Carter is aspirational in the Beethoven sense, but hardly optimistic. For Said, optimism is almost wholly 19th-century progressive.

The Wagner exchanges are more original than those about Beethoven. Barenboim defends Harry Kupfer's representation of Alberich in a production of The Ring he conducted at Bayreuth from accusations of Der Stürmer-like anti-Jewish caricature. Both men separate Wagner's polemical anti-Semitism from his musical characterisation, whether the concern be for Alberich, Beckmesser, Mime or Klingsor. And both regard Wagner as the crux of the crisis of tonality, the chromatic overreacher, seeing him, as Auden did, as "the genius of the loud Steam Age''.

Many readers will be attracted to this book by knowing that these famous friends belong to opposite countries of the most divisive political confrontation of the day, the Israel/Palestine dispute. Apart from some mention of "The Oslo Accord'', the topic remains largely unexplored. Said recalls hearing the Vienna Philharmonic in Cairo, and Barenboim fought the ban on playing Wagner in Israel, and sponsored performances with Israeli and Palestinian musicians. But each avoids the easy remedy of seeking to reconcile their countrymen's antagonism by wrapping it in the warm embrace of art.

Is Bach's world safer than Wagner's? Is it the case that nothing in Die Meistersinger ("heilige Deutsche Kunst'') is as jingoistic as Shakespeare in Henry V? "You should play Mozart and Beethoven as though each was a first performance and Boulez and Carter as if they had already the experience of a hundred years," says Barenboim.

He also quotes Boulez: "When I compose I cook with water, and when l conduct I cook with fire." Read Parallels and Paradoxes, and be confronted with such questions and assertions.

Peter Porter's latest collection of poetry is 'Max is Missing' (Picador)