University of Virginia Library

Pablo Casals At 95: A Personal Appreciation Of A Genius

—Ed.)

"It is good to know that you enjoy music so much; music is
one of the main sources of spiritual inspiration."

On that warm evening in late May, the atmosphere in the
Theatre of the University of Puerto Rico seemed electrically
charged. The orchestra was on stage, and houselights had been
dimmed. There were more than 2000 people present for the
opening concert of the 1967 Festival Casals de Puerto Rico,
and every member of that audience eagerly awaited the
appearance of Pablo Casals. Although I had come to admire
the work of the great 'cellist and conductor through
recordings, I had never before heard him in concert.

I had read that the whole audience rose in tribute to Casals
when he walked out on to the stage, and, I must admit, I had
found that a little hard to believe. My disbelief vanished in an
instant, though, when I found myself, along with everyone else
in the hall, standing and applauding for the diminutive, elderly
figure who made his way to the podium with slow but steady
and secure steps. Casals acknowledged the ovation, greeted the
soloist and the orchestra, and settled himself on the high stool
from which he conducts, half sitting, half standing. As he

raised his baton, the orchestra and the audience came to
attention. Casals brought the baton down with a stroke of
conviction and of authority and began a performance of
Robert Schumann's Cello Concerto.

I marvelled at what I saw and heard. Any lingering doubts
which I may have harbored about Casals's genius fast
disappeared in the course of that concert. The baton, as if by
some sort of geriatric miracle, trimmed 50 years off of his age,
and the Festival Orchestra played as though possessed. And
possessed it was, by the same infectious musicality, humanity,
and genius of Pablo Casals that captivated me that night and
that has continued to bring joy to me ever since.

"I was born in December, 1876, in Vendrell, a village in
Catalonia about 70 kilometres from Barcelona. From the
beginning of my life. I lived in music."

Pablo Casals will celebrate his ninety-fifth birthday on the
29th of this month. It seems hard to believe that this
remarkable man, who is still so active, so energetic, and so
forward-looking, first saw the light of day in 1876, the year of
the invention of the telephone. He is lucky to be alive, too, for
he was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck.
His father, Charles Casals, was the village organist, and his
mother, Pilar Defillo de Casals, was a native of Mayaguez,
Puerto Rico, and has been the guiding influence in his life.

Casals began to study the piano at four, the violin at seven,
and the organ at nine, and started singing in the church choir
at five. From the outset Casals has been a versatile and gifted
musician, but it was not until he was eleven, however, that he
heard the instrument that was to change his life.

"There came to the village three good musicians, a pianist, a
violinist, and a 'cellist. I had never seen a 'cello. The 'cello was
so wonderful to me, so profound, so human, that I became in
love with that instrument. I said to my father, 'I want to play
this instrument!'

"Now my father said, 'Oh, well, but this means that you
have to go to Barcelona, and you know that we are poor.' My
father thought that the career of musician was not a good
career for living, so he spoke to a friend of his, a carpenter,
offering me to be the apprentice of carpentry.

'Now to that my mother opposed. Mother has seen in me
the gift of music, and she said, 'Pablo has to be a musician.'
My father was not convinced, but he had to accept. My
mother, who was a great human being, said, 'God will help us,
and our son will go anywhere to follow his destiny. He must
be a musician.' "

So, in 1888, Casals and his mother set out for Barcelona
where he was to study for the next six years. His 'cello teacher
at the Municipal Music School in Barcelona was the same
'cellist whose instrument had so captivated the young Casals in
Vendrell. The boy made remarkable progress, and within a
year he was playing well enough to take a part time job to help
support himself and his mother.

"I had been engaged to play in a cafe in a suburb of
Barcelona, and we used to play all the light music, with a
rather good pianist and a French violinist. But, once a week, I
played solo. These were my first concerts. Let us say, I have
done everything in music, everything in music; well, what a
musician must do. A musician must begin as a soldier so as to
become a general."

"The Kid" who played in the suburban cafe fast made a
name for himself, and he soon came to the attention of the
pianist Albeniz who told Pilar Casals that he wanted to take
her son with him to London to further the boy's career. She
objected, saying she wanted her son to finish his education.
Albeniz acceded to her wishes and instead gave to her a letter
of introduction to Guillermo, Count de Morphy, the private
secretary to Queen Maria Cristina. When Casals graduated from
the Municipal Music School in Barcelona with first prizes in
'cello, piano, and composition at the age of 17, he journeyed
to Madrid with his mother and his two much younger
brothers. Enrique and Luis, and sought out the Count de
Morphy. Impressed both by the playing and by the
compositions of the young 'cellist, the Count presented Casals
to the Queen who allowed him an annual stipend so that he
could continue his studies. Under the Count de Morphy's
supervision, Casals received a thorough general education, and
pursued his musical studies at the Conservatory, and by the time
he was twenty, Casals and his mother felt that it was time to
move on in the furtherance of his career.

"The Count de Morphy wanted to retain me in Madrid to
help him, because the Count de Morphy was the promoter of
the Spanish opera in Spain. My mother thought that I was a
'cellist and had to have a career as a 'cellist."

After unpleasant and unproductive stays in Brussels and
Paris, Casals returned to Barcelona to teach in the Municipal
Music School. In 1899, shortly before his 23rd birthday, he
made his official debut with the Orchestre des Concerts
Lamoureux in Paris. Casals was an instant success and set out
on a career which continues today, some 72 years later.

As a concert 'cellist, Don Pablo has travelled all over the
Western hemisphere and played for many diverse audiences. In
1899, he played a command performance for Queen Victoria.
In 1901, when he made his first concert tour of this country,
the Wild West was still a reality, and, on one occasion, Casals,
winning heavily at cards in a Western saloon, came close to
becoming involved in a gun battle. He was offered a drink
which he refused, saying he didn't drink while playing cards.
One of the cowboys with whom he was playing put his six gun
on the table and said, "Here we drink and play cards." Casals
drank. Don Pablo enjoys watching the Westerns on television
because they bring back memories of the Wild West as he knew
it some seventy years ago.

In 1904, on his second concert tour of the United States,
he played for Theodore Roosevelt in the White House. He was
concertizing in Tsarist Russia at the time of the Revolution of
1905. Between 1900 and 1930, Casals played as many as 200
solo engagements a year. At the same time, he was a member
of the famous Cortot-Thibaud-Casals Trio, a legendary
ensemble that concertized for nearly thirty years and which
did a great deal to rescue the piano trios of Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven. Schubert, and Schumann from undeserved neglect.

In 1920, Casals founded his own orchestra in Barcelona
which he conducted and played for without fee and which he
supported out of his own pocket for several seasons until it
was able to stand on its own financially. In the mid 1930 s,
however, when he was at the apex of his remarkable career,
Pablo Casals was forced to the self-assessment that caused him
to make what has perhaps been the most painful decision of
his life.

"I am a musician. A musician is a human being, with all the
attributes and obligations from and to mankind. A musician,
as every man, has the right of action following his
conscience...My 'cello is my only weapon; so I said, 'No more,
I don't play any more.' "

When Franco's forces took control of Spain and crushed
The Spanish Republic, Casals went into self imposed exile
outside his native country, and vowed never again to play in
public until Spain was free. As the place of his exile, Casals
chose Prades, a town in the Pyrenees in French portion of
Catalonia; here he was to live for nearly 20 years, throughout
the trying days of the Second World War when he was under
constant surveillance by the Nazis as a result of his open
anti-Fascist sentiments. He emerged from exile briefly after
the war was over and made some concert appearances but
went back into self-imposed seclusion early in 1947 when it
became apparent to him that the Allies were not going to
depose Franco, despite his Axis sympathies. Until late in 1949,
Casals rebuffed many attempts, by impresarios and by friends,
to convince him to return to the concert stage.

"Alexander Schneider came to Prades, inviting me to come
to the United States and play. I said to him, 'I have decided
not to play any more during this time of trouble.'

"Then he proposed to me to have music in Prades. 'If you
don't want to come with us, the musicians of the United
States will come to you.'

"I said to him, 'Well, this is another thing. I accept. And we
had a whole festival dedicated to Bach, a wonderful festival.' "

The Bach Festival in Prades was held in 1950, the 200th
anniversary of the composer's death. The little town, whose
one hotel accommodated but 18 guests, became for two weeks
the musical center of the world. Among the many musicians
and friends of Casals who participated in the concerts were
Joseph Szigeti, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, Marcel Tabuteau,
Isaac Stern, Alexander Schneider, and Rudolf Serkin; and Don
Pablo's younger brother. Enrique, came from Spain to be the
Principal Second Violinist in the Festival Orchestra. The concerts
were held in the Cathedral of Saint Pierre in Prades, a Gothic
edifice whose vaults, I am told were hung with fishnets by
Enrique Casals in order to improve the acoustics. At the

opening concert, the Archbishop of Perpignan addressed the
audience and requested them to refrain from applause since
the concerts were being held in a church. At the end of the last
concert, however, the Archbishop himself began the applause,
and the ovation which Casals and the other participants in the
Festival received id reported to have lasted three-quarters of an
hour.

"Bach is the greatest composer. He is the beginning and the
end, the alpha and the omega. Bach's music is so truthful, so
natural, and so profound. In his music you can find the
deepest and most sincere feelings."

At the age of thirteen, Casals discovered Bach when he
found a score of the Six Suites for Violoncello Alone in a
second hand music store in Barcelona. Casals worked on them
for twelve years before he felt prepared to play them in public,
and, when he did program them, he was the first 'cellist to
play any of the suites in its entirety in public. Until that time,
'cellists occasionally played one or two movements in a
concert, but never a complete suite.

Each morning for more than eighty years, Don Pablo has
been in the habit of playing two of the Preludes and Fugues
from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier before proceeding with his
day's work. "It is my blessing on my house," he told me, and I
once had the good fortune to hear him play the Preludes and
Fugues Nos. 5 and 6 from Book One of Well-Tempered
Clavier. He uses them as meditations, and, on the basis of the
piano playing I heard that morning. I believe that, in gaining
an incomparable 'cellist and conductor, the world lost a great
concert pianist.

Casals's approach to Bach has frequently been criticized
because it is not "authentic." That Casals cares little for
antique instruments and Baroque performance practice is quite
apparent, but his Bach has a pure, natural, meaningful quality
that transcends all considerations of period; it is totally devoid
of the excesses in tempo, dynamics, and ensemble size of
which such conductors as Mengelberg, Furtwangler, and
Stokowski were guilty all too frequently. If met on their
own terms, Casals's interpretations of Bach's music, like those
of Wanda Landowska, are the most communicative and direct
of all.

After the Bach Festival in Prades, Casals realized that,
through these music festivals he could use his art as a
productive form of protest, and as a way to spread his beliefs
throughout the world. The Bach Festival was followed in 1951
by the Perpignan Festival, and after that by a whole series of
Prades Festivals.

"What gives me more joy is to try to give to the others what
I have received from God. If God has given me a gift of music,
what a joy to give it to the young musicians."

Casals has been teaching for three quarters of a century,
and, even during his busiest years as a concert artist managed
to take 'cello students. With Alfred Cortot and Jacques
Thibaud, he was a founder of the Ecole Normale de Musique
in Paris, and, while in exile in Prades, he continued to take
pupils, and, after the initiation of the Prades Festivals, he
greatly expanded his teaching schedule. Don Pablo began to
hold annual master classes in Zermatt and in Florence and in
the 1960's gave a series of master classes at Berkeley. He
continues to teach today.

Over the years, Don Pablo has taught a number of fine
'cellists, including Maurice Gendron. Madeleine Foley, Leslie
Parnas, Maurice Eisenberg, and Gaspar Cassado, to name but a
few. In fact, in New York last year, at a concert in his honor,
Casals conducted 100 'cellists who had studied with him, in a
performance of his Sardana for 'Celli.

Don Pablo's natural kindness and understanding is the core
of his teaching method. He does not scold, shame, or insult his
students. He cajoles; he demonstrates; he explains in words, in
voice inflections, in singing. There is in his teaching an
enchanting give and take between master and pupil that leaves
the observer with the impression that the student is, in fact,
teaching himself.

Casals has revolutionized 'cello playing and has made an
indelible mark on string playing in general. No longer do
'cellists play with a stiff arm nor do they practice with a book
held under the armpit, for in his revolutionary technique, as in
everything else in music, Casals emphasizes the need for a
natural but disciplined approach.

"With my wife, Martita, I have had the best years of my
life."

One of the students who came to Casals in Prades was a
young Puerto Rican girl, Marta Montanez. Martita, as she is
known, is an attractive black haired young woman with an
engaging smile and a serious but friendly and vivacious
disposition. A brilliant musician, she found in the course of
her studies with Don Pablo that, despite a difference of 60
years in their ages, their relationship was deeper than that of
student and teacher. When Casals at last decided to visit Puerto
Rico, the birthplace of his mother, Martita accompanied him
and, after he decided to take up residence on the island, she
helped him get settled.

In 1957, the first Festival Casals de Puerto Rico was held,
but Casals did not participate. He had had a heart attack
during the first rehearsal. Martita helped to nurse him back to
health and, on August 3, 1957, they were married. The
difference in their ages bothers neither of them, and Don
Pablo takes pleasure in remarking that it is not every man who
has a father-in-law thirty years his junior.

Martita's physical resemblance to Don Pablo's mother is
striking, and Casals has always felt that it is more than mere
coincidence that her mother and his mother were born in the
same house in Mayaguez. I remember remarking to Martita
that a small hand painted photograph that I saw in their house
was a fine likeness of her, only to have her tell me that the
photograph was of Don Pablo's mother and that I was not the
first to make the incorrect identification.

"I came to Puerto Rico in '56. From that moment began
the idea of giving my work for peace in the entire world, and
this is what I am doing."

At the age of 80, an age when most men have greatly
restricted their activities, Casals began to expand his. He came
out of self-imposed exile to play at the United Nations in
1958, at the White House for President Kennedy in 1961, and,
since 1960, Don Pablo has spent part of every summer
conducting and teaching at the Marlboro Music Festival in
Vermont. The 1960's have seen the completion of his oratorio.
El Pessebre (The Manger), a moving and eloquent plea for
peace which Casals has travelled all over the world to conduct.
Don Pablo has directed performances of El Pessebre in such
diverse places as West Berlin, Jerusalem, and the United
Nations.

Photo by H. L. Kirk

Casals Practices The 'Cello For 3 Hours Each Morning

"We need liberty; the first thing a man has to have is liberty.
This is why I don't conceive a country with a dictator...but I
don't conceive, in art or in life, liberty without order or
anything that the human being needs without order...Absolute
independence is a bad thing. If I want to be independent, I will
not think of what my neighbor thinks or what my neighbor
needs, and this is bad.

"We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree,
and the tree is all humanity. We can't live without the others,
without the tree. Now, we must think of the whole, the whole
thing...Naturally, where there is intelligence, there is love.

The essence of Casals, as a man and as an artist, is his
humanity. No one is insignificant; every human being from the
smallest child to the most important head of state is worthy
of respect and decent treatment. Don Pablo believes
fundamentally in the rights of the individual but not at the
expense of the good of the whole. This humanistic attitude has
deeply influenced his musical thinking as well. No composition,
no individual note within a composition is so insignificant that
it is not worthy of the most concerted interpretive effort. Who
else but Pablo Casals could record the Londonderry Air or Oh,
Dry Those Tears! and turn it into a work of art? The music he
makes has a character of its own, individualistic, natural, and
colorful, but never marred by excess of any kind. At 95, Casals
continues to be as conscientious, as thorough, and as
understanding about music as his recordings indicate that he
was at 45, perhaps more so. "I never play a work the same way
twice," Don Pablo once told me, "Perhaps that is why I never
listen to my own recordings."

Casals cherishes his past and the memories of the greats and
near greats whom he has known: Camille Saint-Saens, Claude
Debussy, Louis Vierne, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Eugene Carriere,
Joseph Joachim, and Ignace Jan Paderewski, for example.
Casals's importance as a link with the past was made quite clear
to me when he told me that, when he was 23 and visited
London for the first time, he met a 95 year old man who had
known Beethoven and who had taken piano lessons from
Mendelssohn.

Yet, when he surveys his career, Don Pablo does so with an
eye to the future. He continues to practice the 'cello every
morning for three hours. About 10 years ago, a reporter asked
him why, at his age, he still did so. Casals is said to have
answered, "Because I think I am beginning to make some
progress." "Of course, I continue to play and to practice,' he
told a biographer. "I think I would do so if I lived for another
100 years. I could not betray my old friend, the 'cello."

As Casals approaches 95, I can not help but recall an
incident that took place seven years ago. I was travelling with
my family in the Caribbean, and we stopped in Puerto Rico
for one day. I went to a pay telephone and called the Casals
house to see if I might come out to meet him. Martita Casals
informed me that it was his 88th birthday and that the entire
day was taken up with the celebrations. I remember hanging
up that telephone and thinking, "Pablo Casals is 88 today. It'll
be two or three years before I get back to Puerto Rico. I shall
never meet this remarkable man." Two and a half years later
Casals and I were sitting on the terrace of his house, talking. I
told him about that phone call and my reaction to it and
concluded by remarking, "Master, you fooled me."

Pablo Casals looked at me, smiled, rested his hand on my
arm, and said, "Yes, and I intend to go on fooling you, too."

Don Pablo, happy birthday! May there be many, many
more. God bless you.

Copyright, 1971
The Cavalier Daily