London, Nov 29 : Renowned pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim is getting ready for his debut at New York''s Metropolitan Opera.

Barenboim, 66, will be the first conductor other than music director James Levine to lead the Met''s opera since 1974, and he will be taking charge of Richard Wagner''s Tristan und Isolde.

“Tristan is an opera about death. There is nothing more democratic in the world than death,” the BBC quoted him as saying.

“It is that death, the fear of death and the looking for death as the only possible way to solve the entanglement in which they find, this is the motor of the opera.

“In the end, it comes to everyone. He who spends his life thinking about death misses out on one of the most forceful dimensions of human existence,” he added.

Barenboim, who grew up in Israel and is known for his championing of Palestinian rights, had performed extracts from the opera in Israel in 2001, breaking an unofficial ban on works by Wagner, whose anti-Semitic views influenced Adolf Hitler. (ANI)