On stage on Monday night at Columbia University's Miller Theatre, the Argentine-born conductor and pianist Daniel Barenboim did not touch the Steinway concert grand until the very end. But the audience was deeply engaged nonetheless.
Barenboim was giving the inaugural Edward Said Memorial Lecture, named in honour of his friend, the writer, critic and Palestinian advocate who died in 2003. His subject was "Wagner, Israel & Palestine". Under any circumstances this topic would have been charged, but over the course of the current academic year, incidents between Jewish students and Arab professors at Columbia have sown divisions on campus and reached the level where student rights and academic freedoms are colliding with one other.
Such a fraught environment is nothing new for the Jewish musician, however, who caused furore and endured abuse in Israel when he was the first person to conduct Wagner publicly.
Columbia was a fitting setting for the lecture: Barenboim's friendship with Said, whose vocal defence of Palestinian rights often made him a lightning rod for controversy, was born of both men's belief that Israelis and Palestinians alike had to learn to "form one narrative".
However, musical narrative, more than prose, was the crux of their friendship. The two first collaborated 15 years ago on Beethoven's Fidelio in Chicago, where Barenboim is the musical director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; Barenboim asked Said to write an accompanying monologue for it. For some years, Said was also music critic of The Nation magazine.
Their greatest joint accomplishment was the formation, in 1999, of the West-East Divan Workshop, which brings together young Israeli and Arab musicians to play in a touring orchestra, to discuss the crucial issues and to take part in musical scholarship programmes.
Said, his friend recalled in the first part of his lecture, "seemed like one of the few who was interested in Truth, not his truth".
"He had the courage to say whatever he thought or felt no matter who his audience was."
In speaking about Said's "moral authority", Barenboim did not skim over Said's vacillation between a two-state and a one-state solution to the conflict; in the end Said had come to believe that creating a second state was geographically impossible.
The subject of Barenboim's talk, Richard Wagner, had equally little compunction in speaking his mind, although the composer was a "horrible, virulent anti-Semite". Yet this, Barenboim argued, was no reason not to perform his music, even in Israel. The second part of his lecture was in danger of becaming bogged down in a history of Wagner's changing artistic reputation, coupled with Barenboim's own travails in 2001, when he conducted the overture to Tristan und Isolde at the Israel Festival - and then only after 45 minutes of heated discussion with audience members.
"It was never my intention, nor shall it ever be, to force this music on anybody. It should be up to the people," he said, but added: "I left the stage with a feeling of gratitude for the music and a feeling that the message got across."
Towards the end of the lecture, his passionate advocacy of a new form of Israeli-Palestinian relations emerged. Barenboim called on Israel to accept the Palestinian "narrative even though they may not agree with it".
"The state of Israel was supposed to provide the instrument for the end of anti-Semitism," Barenboim said. "This inability to accept a new narrative has led to a new anti-Semitism that is very different from the European anti-Semitism of the 19th century."
Having come full circle on Wagner, he returned to Said and his legacy. "You cannot have equality without freedom and you cannot have freedom without brotherhood. And this is what Edward and I tried to do, in a completely non-violent way," he said.
"There is a great deal left to be done."
