IN JUNE 1998 Bernd Kaufmann, then general manager for event planning in Weimar, the “European Capital of Culture” in 1999, invited Daniel Barenboim to perform. Initially Mr Barenboim said no: he was already fully occupied as pianist, director of the Berlin State Opera, and conductor of the Staatskappelle Berlin and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. But when Mr Neumann persisted, underlining the importance of Weimar as the town of Goethe and Schiller and the cradle of German democracy, as well as the place of Buchenwald, a former Nazi concentration camp. Mr Barenboim was convinced.

Their idea was to resume the dialogue between Occident and Orient found in Goethe’s “West Eastern Divan”, a collection of poems inspired by Hafez, a Persian poet. Messrs Barenboim and Kaufmann wanted to stage a chamber concert with the equal number of young Israeli and Palestinian musicians. Mr Barenboim asked his friend Edward Said, a Palestinian-American scholar of literature, to help him find young talented Arab musicians. Thirty-five Palestinian musicians where chosen out of more than 200 applicants for the first joint Israeli-Palestinian workshop. 60% of the musicians had never played in an orchestra, and 20% had never seen a live concert before.

The workshop’s focus was not only on the musical training but also on humanitarian education. While Mr Barenboim was busy with the rehearsals, Said led discussion evenings, often quite controversial, about music, culture and politics. By the end of summer 1999 it became clear the concert was not just a one-time project, and the West Eastern Divan Orchestra was founded. Volunteer musicians from the State Opera in Berlin, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra helped to train the young musicians. After three concerts in Weimar and two in Chicago, the orchestra settled in Andalusia in 2002. Young Spanish musicians were admitted—a boon for its social life. “With the Spaniards it was possible to sometimes focus on something other than politics without feeling they were avoiding the obvious,” says Sharon Cohen, a violinist and long-time member.

Although the orchestra’s quality of playing improved, “it was still the same after its third year and in need of new blood.”  Mr Barenboim had a dream of a permanent academy where new musicians from enemy regions of the Middle East could be trained in peace.

This October, his dream came true: 37 students from Israel, Palestine, Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Turkey, as well as from Europe and America, began their first academic year at the Barenboim-Said-Academy in Berlin, officially inaugurated on December 8th. Said, who died in 2003, was represented by his widow Miriam Said, who has been advancing his ideas since then. She says her husband would have been delighted.

The former depot of Berlin’s State Opera on Unter den Linden, Mr Barenboim’s domain, has been converted into a modern academy with state-of-the art technology, including a splendid new concert hall designed by Frank Gehry, a Californian architect, and Yasuhisa Toyota, a Japanese acoustician. It is named after Pierre Boulez, a celebrated French composer and conductor, who died in January 2016.

One third of the construction costs of €34m was covered by private donations (€1m alone from Italy’s former president, Giorgio Napolitano), and €20m came from the German ministry for culture, which will also pay the Academy’s annual operating costs of €5.5m from 2017. Both Mr Gehry and Mr Toyota worked for no fee. Germany’s foreign office is providing the merit scholarships, as well as tuition for all students (up to 90 in the next years). The teaching language is English.

The students will spend one fourth of their time in humanities classes such as history, philosophy and literature. “The world of sounds is so abstract. One needs a bit of help to learn what to think of our world, about one’s position in this world,” Mr Barenboim explained in his inauguration speech. Yamen Saadi, a young Palestinian violin student, put it in a nutshell: “I came from Nazareth and was not very comfortable there. Now I have Israeli friends. What we learn here is philosophy and literature, and we learn how to think.” For his part Mr Barenboim sees his mission in teaching the students to listen, not only to sounds but also to each other.

But he makes it very clear that “this is not a political but a humanistic project…It can’t bring peace—we are talking about the Middle East. But for people who want to achieve something together music is an outstanding method.” He sees his academy as “a project in exile”, one that should actually be in Ramallah or Tel Aviv. Since that is impossible, Berlin is the best place, not only as “the world’s capital of music”, but because of its history of division and reconciliation.

On March 4th and 5th the Pierre Boulez concert hall will officially be inaugurated, with two concerts by the Boulez Ensemble, with Mr Barenboim conducting and playing piano. The line-up of artists and the range of compositions by Boulez, Schubert, Mozart, Alban Berg and Jörg Widmann stands for the diversity of its future concert programme—a delightful gain for Berlin’s cultural life. On December 8th, to the joyful surprise and delight of the inauguration guests, Mr Barenboim and his Divan Orchestra gave an unofficial inauguration of their own with a brief début in their new hall.

What began as a utopian vision has now been turned into reality. It is a promising start, and all the more so at the end of a bitterly divisive year. That year reached an apogee of cruelty for the Germans on December 19th when Anis Amri, a radicalised Tunisian immigrant, drove a stolen lorry into a Berlin Christmas market, killing 12 people. Berlin, hit by such a horrific attack for the first time, was in deep shock. The leaders of the Barenboim-Said Academy have avoided speaking about the attacks, replying to an e-mail that they are “just a Musikhochschule [music academy]”. But what Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, said in her New Year’s speech about Western democracy is also true of the academy. It is “an alternative concept to a world of terrorism full of hatred.”