Daniel Barenboim is a Jewish conductor who attracts lightning, most recently when an Israeli minister called him “a real Jew-hater, a real anti-semite”.

He has been accused of worse and it makes him angry. But right now he has another bee in his bonnet.

“I am very unhappy, and have been for a long time, about the place of music in society,” he says. It makes Barenboim so exasperated that he has devoted his Reith lectures to the subject, beginning pianissimo in London last week and building his theme over the next month in Chicago, Berlin, Ramallah and finally Jerusalem.

These Reith lectures on Radio 4 mark a new departure, commandeering the Desert Island Discs Friday slot and its presenter, Sue Lawley, who prompts the maestro to make his pitch before audiences ask him questions. The format plays to Barenboim’s talent for mixing the profound with humour, even if it occasionally sounds like a love-in between classical devotees.

Barenboim is one of the top four or five names in the classical music world and has been making waves for most of his 63 years. He was a seven-year-old child prodigy on piano when he made his stage debut playing Prokofiev. In the late 1960s he married the beautiful and brilliant English cellist Jacqueline du Pré and the golden couple were lionised like rock stars as they toured the world.

Struck down by multiple sclerosis, du Pré was wheelchair-bound for her last 14 years, gradually losing the use of her limbs, much of her sight and eventually her power of speech before her death in 1987.

Barenboim has condemned as “abhorrent” the film Hilary and Jackie, about the cellist’s relationship with her sister, which depicted a sexually ravenous du Pré. It also brought into the open the fact that while she was ill Barenboim was conducting an affair with the Russian pianist Elena Bashkirova, now his wife. It was an open secret that they were living together in Paris during the last eight years of du Pré’s life, and had two sons, although he continued to care for du Pré in London.

After breaking the Israeli cultural taboo of giving a performance in Jerusalem of Richard Wagner, whose music sometimes accompanied Jews to the gas chambers, he was accused of “cultural rape”. “Someone had to explain to me the meaning of that expression,” he says wryly. While acknowledging Wagner was a virulent anti-semite, Barenboim contends that he was not responsible for Auschwitz.

Last summer his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra of young Israeli and Arab musicians set the Proms alight before playing Ramallah, the Palestinian town under virtual occupation on the West Bank. He feels less at ease in Israel, where he lived briefly as a child, than in Germany, where he runs the Berlin State Opera and is a champion of German music. He is also completing his few months as musical director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

So what is his beef about music’s place in society? “My main grievance is that music is not any more part of the general culture,” he replies. “When you go to kindergarten and school, you don’t come into contact with classical music. No one seems to think it’s as important to know your Beethoven as your Shakespeare or Goethe.”

He wants the classics taught in the general curriculum and removed from the “ivory tower” where he believes they have been consigned. It’s almost as if he wants to inflict his own strict musical upbringing on others. His parents were Russian musicians who nurtured his talent from a young age in Argentina, where he spent his first 10 years.

Pre-empting this thought, he says: “You understand, my object is not to create the conditions for thousands of child prodigies. I’m simply talking about what I feel is the necessity for the human being to have music in his life.”

His prescriptions sound a bit extreme. If society decides classical music is important, he says, we should “radically revise” the way it is presented to children. “And if it’s unimportant, we have to go all the way and close everything — close all the concerts and operas — and forget all about it.”