Barenboim vs. Oh Se-hoon
By Kim Heung-sook
Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon has failed to prevent overall offering of free meals to elementary and middle school students owing to Wednesday’s referendum, which was annulled for lack of voter participation.
However, I feel not happy but frustrated considering how severely Seoulites were divided over the wasteful political show that cost 18.2 billion won. Some even observed the referendum was contention between the Christians and non-Christians, noting Protestant mega-churches’ ardent support of Oh’s efforts.
One consoling thing about this unjustifiable affair is that Oh will leave City Hall after five years of hard-to-understand policies and measures that seemed to be focused perennially on “designing” the time-honored city. More than a few viewed the “designing” as synonymous to “destroying” the traditional beauty and function of the capital.
On Sunday, Oh publicly pledged to quit if the referendum didn’t turn out the way he wished. He campaigned for limited offering for the “poor students only,” while his opponents called for free meals for all for the sake of the youngsters’ emotional as well as physical well-being.
Frustration caused by a person can be dissipated best by another person and I am lucky to have just seen Maestro Daniel Barenboim, who steered a sweaty, open-air concert into a memorable event on Aug. 15 at Imjingak Pyeonghwa Nuri near the inter-Korean border.
The plastic mats the organizers handed out were too thin to block the wetness of the grass. On the rehearsal stage, the 100 members of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra were struggling to produce a desirable sound despite the sultry weather. I couldn’t feel sorrier for the timpanist who seemed to be having a real hard time finding the right pitch.
When I was going to the “Peace Concert” at a friend’s invitation, I was half-hearted. The venue was quite far and the program featured Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 only, which I loved and yet had heard several times from the world’s best orchestras and vocalists.
When the music started, however, I couldn’t believe my ears. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s rendition of the symphony was one of the best I had ever heard live. The 130-strong chorus comprising the National Chorus, Goyang City Chorus and Seoul Motet Choir presented a great example of group singing. Last but not least, the thousands of audience members were a fine collection of civilized people I hadn’t seen often lately.
I could understand why Barenboim and Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American academic, chose music as the way of promoting peace. They founded the Divan in 1999 with young musicians mostly from the Middle East, a region continuously plagued by conflicts, including those between Israelis and Palestinians.
I could also understand why they named the orchestra after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s anthology of poems, a symbol of East-West harmony. I earnestly wished that the symphony would travel northward and touch the hearts of the people in the communist half of the Korean peninsula.
In a 2008 interview, Barenboim said that the Divan was conceived as “a project against ignorance. It is a project against the fact that it is absolutely essential for people to get to know the other, to understand what the other thinks and feels, without necessarily agreeing with it.” He said he was not trying to convert the Arab members of the Divan to the Israeli point of view or vice versa. He also said, “I am not interested in getting the orchestra to play the way I want it to play.
What I am interested in is to see how to get 100 people to think and feel alike, to get together and feel one huge common lung. That you breathe the music the same way. That's what is interesting.”
Wielding the baton while wiping his sweat, Barenboim succeeded in making numerous Koreans and others “feel one huge common lung” on that evening. It is unfortunate that we, South and North Korea, don’t have our own Divan whereas we need such an endeavor more than any other people in the world, being the only divided nation on the globe.
If Mayor Oh missed the concert because of the campaign, I recommend that he find its audio-visual version and watch and listen attentively. He may not be as inspired by Barenboim as me but he will be able to learn at least one important lesson: “Great minds unite and don’t divide people.”
The writer is a freelance columnist and a translator. She can be reached at kimsook@hotmail.com.