Unified by Tchaikovsky

The score of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony looks like that of any other large orchestral piece from the late 19th century. On top of the first page is a melancholy melody for a solo clarinet in its lowest register, which the gloomy composer associated with his resignation before Fate.

Below are chords languidly scattered among the strings. Gradually, more instruments enter, and the pages fill up with notes -- dotted notes, notes held together with arcs, rows of fast 16th notes and furious passages with lines through the stems. To play those tremolo passages, musicians must shake ferociously.

Tens of thousands of musicians have so shaken, have played these notes since the symphony’s premiere in 1888. In 1939, the French horn tune of the slow movement was turned into a popular song, “Moon Love.” Untold millions have encountered, in one form or another, the music Tchaikovsky wrote for this popular symphony.

But the score of a symphonic chestnut is hardly the first place most people, especially strategists in Washington or Jerusalem, would look for a secretly encoded road map for peace. Nor have I yet heard -- in answer to one of the most pressing questions in the world, “What next for Gaza?” -- “Why not pick up Daniel Barenboim’s new recording of the Tchaikovsky on Warner Classics?”

Still, as Israeli settlers are being forced out of the Gaza Strip and Israeli troops are planning to leave, no one seems to know exactly what it will take for Israelis and Palestinians to get along. And it was in response to much the same question that Barenboim and the Palestinian cultural and literary theorist (and sometime music critic) Edward Said first held a workshop for young musicians six years ago in Weimar, Germany. Half of those musicians came from Israel and the other half came from 10 Arab nations and the Palestinian territories.

Weimar was chosen, in part, because it was Goethe’s hometown. The 19th century poet was an Orientalist whose poems “West-Eastern Divan” were conceived in a Persian style. Goethe wrote:

Who the song would understand,

Needs must seek the song’s own land.

Who the minstrel understand,

Needs must seek the minstrel’s land.

Barenboim and Said believed that no progress could be made in the Middle East until Jew and Arab could each understand the other’s land. One way for that to happen, the two men also believed, was for these enemies to understand the minstrel’s song.

Initially, the workshop seemed designed to give the Israelis an unfair advantage in what would surely turn out to be a competitive situation. Tchaikovsky may be a way of life in Jerusalem, but he is a luxury in a Palestinian city such as Ramallah -- and not necessarily a desired luxury.

Yet the experiment worked, and in ways that could not have been predicted. It has continued every summer since, despite the logistics getting harder once the second intifada began in 2000. In time, Barenboim created from the young Arab and Israeli musicians a West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. It recorded the Tchaikovsky last summer in Geneva. On Sunday night, it played a concert in Ramallah.

Not everyone is happy. There are some who see, in this, Barenboim grandstanding. But if that’s so, it is exactly the kind of grandstanding we need. The West-Eastern Divan’s Tchaikovsky recording is a remarkable document. It contains a wonderful performance and a lot more. Included is a bonus DVD on which there is a video of the Geneva performance along with a half-hour documentary on the workshops and a nearly 90-minute conversation between Barenboim and Said.

The conversation was held at the conclusion of the first Weimar workshop, and Barenboim and Said cover a lot of territory. Theirs was an unlikely friendship. The son of Russian Jews, Barenboim was born in Argentina, grew up in Israel and now divides his time between an opera company in Berlin and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Said, who died two years ago of leukemia, was a faculty member at Columbia University who delved into issues of national identity and was for a period a spokesman for Yasser Arafat in America.

They came together through music and found they had much in common as a couple of rootless, impossibly arrogant intellectual celebrities. They weren’t afraid of difficult questions, though, and each appeared to have a profoundly humanizing effect on the other.

Barenboim went into the first workshop with high ideals, such as that playing in an orchestra is “the best possible grounding for a democratic experience.” Said worried about music’s ability to diminish identity. Not only does a musician lose personal identity in an orchestra, but the music itself can be politically dangerous. “It can take you out of your reason,” he said.

What Barenboim and Said found, however, was that the cultural differences were not quite where they expected them. There is certainly a level of suspicion between Jew and Arab. In the documentary, a Palestinian from Jordan refuses to continue a discussion with a Ukrainian from Israel if the latter is going to mention that he served in the Israeli army.

But there is also enormous curiosity among these young people. The Israelis and Syrians, for instance, knew nothing about each other. There is just as little contact between Cairo and Damascus. Even Palestinians who live in the West Bank and those in Jordan are divided by cultural differences.

Meanwhile, the players discovered that they shared certain characteristics. Barenboim noted that not only did they look somewhat alike, but they tended to like the same foods and to have similar musical responses. The first workshop was held in the shadow of Buchenwald, the Nazi death camp, and it was a shock for the Arabs to realize that they too would have wound up in the ovens had they been in Germany during the Third Reich. For the first time, they understood that anti-Semitism applies to them too.

I don’t think it is romanticizing the process to say that much of this comes out on the new CD in the Tchaikovsky Fifth. The performance is not particularly strong on detail. Its glory is the beautifully cohesive playing that Barenboim coaxes out of his band.

Individual identities are subsumed for a larger cause of unity. The blending of instruments is spellbinding. So is the beauty of the overall tone of the orchestra. But then a solo will arise -- the opening clarinet, the French horn in the slow movement or many other smaller moments -- when a unique soulfulness can be heard. The players seem to have grasped exactly how to express themselves and yet still participate in a community.

The symphony ends on what some critics have found a false note of triumph. Here it ends with thrilling excitement -- but not stable excitement. These kids know that one orchestra can’t save the world. But they’re not about to stop trying.

There are better-played recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth. But there are no better performances of it, no more meaningful performances, for our time.