Conductivity

Around 11:20 on the morning of Saturday March 17, 2018, Laura Eisen, the orchestral manager of the Staatskapelle Berlin, visited Daniel Barenboim in his dressing room, which looks out onto the imposing Bebelplatz. She planned to discuss a personnel change, in the flutes, for an upcoming rehearsal of Verdi’s opera “Falstaff.” According to a statement Eisen wrote in June 2019 and endorsed in August as a sworn declaration, Barenboim was already angry with her when she came in. “He screamed at me that I should leave the room and that he can’t trust me anymore,” she wrote. “As I was going to respond to him, he came toward me, grabbed me with both hands on my upper body (between my shoulders and throat) and shook me. As he did so, he screamed at me that I should disappear/leave the room. I was shocked and took two steps back toward the door and left. My last memory of the encounter was the expression on Mr. Barenboim’s face. In the moment I shrunk back, he seemed shocked by his own actions.” After work that evening, Eisen told VAN, she felt “terrible.” “I thought, ‘I can’t believe this happened.’ It was completely inappropriate. But mostly I was angry that it happened to me, and that I let it happen.”