Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim in the Wiener Musikverein – Kultur

They end up making children’s games. Literally. Playing the eleventh piece from Georges Bizet’s “Jeux d’enfant”, it is called “Petit mari, petite femme”. Before that he announces it, he says that Bizet not only wrote “Carmen” but also piano pieces for four hands. And then they play what he translated as “little man, little woman.” Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim are sitting next to each other on piano stools in the main hall of the Wiener Musikverein, she is on the left, he is on the right, together there are 161 years of music. And involuntarily one thinks, that’s exactly how they could have been sitting there in 1949, in the house of a musician friend in Buenos Aires. That’s when they met, Daniel Barenboim was seven, Martha Argerich eight years old, two child prodigies who became musical lifelong souls for each other.