Pablo Casals

Cellist

• Born: December 29, 1876
• Birthplace: El Vendrell, Catalonia, Spain
• Died: October 22, 1973
• Place of death: San Juan, Puerto Rico

Spanish musician and composer

Although recognized as a conductor and composer, Casals is best known for his sensational mastery of the cello. He evolved systems of fingering and bowing that are the source of modern playing technique, and his musical interpretation greatly enhanced international appreciation of the cello as an instrument of artistic expression.

Area of achievement Music

Early Life

Pablo Casals (PAHB-loh kah-SAHLZ) was born in Vendrell, a small town in the Catalan region of Spain. The second of eleven children of Carlos Casals and Pilar Defilló de Casals, he received his first music instruction from his father, the local church organist and piano teacher. By the time young Casals was five, he sang in the church choir; at six, he studied organ and piano; at seven, he studied violin and also composed and transposed music. He was substituting at the organ for his father when he was eight and, at ten, collaborated on the musical score for the town’s Christmas play. The first cello Casals saw a makeshift instrument was played by a group of wandering minstrels. Soon after, he attended a performance of prominent cellist José García and, at age eleven, asked his father for lessons on the instrument that was to be his specialty. In 1888, at his mother’s insistence despite the opposition of his father, Casals went to the Municipal Music School in Barcelona and became a pupil of García. He also studied piano and composition with José Rodereda. Casals made very rapid progress, winning prizes and assisting with classes. He rebelled against the conventional techniques the stiff right arm and restricted left-hand fingering and his early experimentation with bowing and fingering produced his unique style. To support himself while in school, Casals organized a trio and performed at the Café Tost. He incorporated classical music into the café repertoire, attracting the attention of the intellectual elite in Barcelona; among these listeners was the well-known composer Isaac Albéniz, who quickly became Casals’s friend and adviser. It was also during these years that Casals discovered Johann Sebastian Bach’s unaccompanied suites for cello, which helped launch his career of serious study and through which he later popularized the cello in solo performance.

After graduation, armed with letters of introduction from Albéniz, Casals left for Madrid in 1893. There, he met Count de Morphy, an adviser to the queen regent and an avid music enthusiast. De Morphy helped Casals obtain a scholarship to the Royal Conservatory of Music in Madrid, where he studied under Tomás Bretón (composition) and Jesús de Monasterio (chamber music). In 1895, Casals went to Brussels to study at the conservatory there. After only one day, he left abruptly disturbed by the response to his cello audition and went to Paris, where he played at the Folies-Marigny music hall. After a short time, Casals returned to Barcelona and accepted the position held by his former teacher, García, at the Municipal Music School. Casals threw himself into his teaching and also played in churches and the Opéra orchestra. He joined a piano trio, founded a string quartet, and even played in a casino in Portugal during the summers. After several years of such hard work, Casals had saved enough money to launch his career as a virtuoso.

Life’s Work

Carrying letters of introduction to Charles Lamoureaux, the famous conductor, Casals went to Paris in the fall of 1899. His playing so impressed Lamoureaux that his Paris debut was arranged with Lamoureaux’s orchestra on November 12, 1899. Casals was an instant sensation and became in great demand all over Western Europe. He toured in the United States from 1901 to 1902 and then again in 1903-1904. In 1903, he also played concerts in South America, and it soon became clear that Casals was one of the greatest cellists of all time. In 1906, Casals married one of his pupils, the Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia. After a divorce, he was married again in 1914, to the American singer Susan Metcalfe. By 1914, Casals’s international reputation had already reached its height, and it was sustained during the 1920’s and 1930’s by his extensive and extremely successful concert tours. Casals was also active as a conductor and performed as guest conductor with leading orchestras in cities such as Vienna, Paris, Rome, London, New York, Zurich, Prague, Berlin, and Buenos Aires. While not traveling, Casals divided his residence between Paris and Barcelona. In Paris, in addition to playing recitals and concerts, he formed a noted trio ensemble with violinist Jacques Thibaud and pianist Alfred Cortot, and these three men helped Auguste Mangeot found the Paris Normal School of Music in 1914. During these years, Casals had close friendships with musicians such as Fritz Kreisler, Maurice Ravel, and Camille Saint-Saëns.

After World War I, Casals turned his attention to his homeland. Because he believed Barcelona needed a first-class symphony orchestra, Casals founded his Pau Casals Orchestra there in 1919, despite great obstacles and friends who tried to dissuade him. On October 13, 1920, the first concert of the Pau Casals Orchestra was performed in the Music Auditorium of the Catalan Palace. As Casals had been warned, the city was apathetic, but he continued to give magnificent concerts, and eventually his audiences grew until the hall was regularly full. When the orchestra became established, Casals developed another goal. He wanted the working people of Barcelona those who could not afford to buy concert tickets to have good music. Once again, through great personal commitment and effort, Casals established the Workingmen’s Concert Association, through which working people could, for a small fee, attend various musical events, including the Sunday-morning concerts of the Pau Casals Orchestra.

In 1936, the life of Casals and the life of his country were interrupted by civil war in Spain. Casals was an ardent supporter of the Loyalist government that was fighting against the forces of General Francisco Franco. Despite the pleading of his friends, Casals stubbornly refused to leave Barcelona; he believed that an artist who tries to ignore political actions that deny human rights is degrading his art. Casals insisted that, during times of great trouble, great music was all the more important for the Spanish people. So, in the middle of war, he continued to conduct his orchestra and give cello performances. He also played some concerts in England and France, contributing his earnings to support the Loyalists. When Franco emerged victorious, Casals left Spain and went into voluntary exile in Prades, a small Catalan village on the French side of the Spanish border. Although this location was at first temporary, Casals rejected offers from the United States and England, and thus Prades became his permanent home in 1939. Casals was a man of great personal dignity and conviction. As he had taken a stand against totalitarianism in Spain, he similarly felt responsible not to leave France during World War II. He supported the Red Cross with proceeds from his concerts, and he personally distributed supplies to fellow Catalans who were living in nearby refugee camps. Because Casals did not separate art from his personal convictions, he refused to play for audiences in Benito Mussolini’s Italy or Adolf Hitler’s Germany or Franco’s Spain. After World War II, following a successful performance tour in England in 1945, Casals realized that no action was going to be taken against the Spanish regime. He thus decided to stop performing in public, believing it was wrong to accept money or even applause from people in democratic nations who, he felt, had abandoned the Spanish people.

This hiatus in public performance, which Casals termed a renunciation, ended in 1950 at the Bach Bicentenary when eminent musicians came to Prades to make music with Casals and he was featured as conductor and soloist. Thus began the annual summer Prades Festival, where many recordings have been made by the distinguished participating musicians. On January 28, 1956, in Veracruz, Mexico, Casals made his first concert appearance outside Prades in many years. In that same year, he finally settled in Puerto Rico, his mother’s birthplace, where he established the Casals Festival in 1957. Like the festival in Prades, this too became an annual event, and it had a stimulating influence on Puerto Rican culture. In 1957, Casals also married for a third time, to Marta Montanez, a youthful Puerto Rican cello student, who was his companion for the rest of his life.

Casals maintained an impressive schedule of composing, conducting, and performing into his eighties and nineties and continued his efforts on behalf of global peace. In 1958, he gave a cello recital at the United Nations General Assembly to celebrate the thirteenth anniversary of the United Nations, a performance broadcast in many countries. In 1961, he played for President John F. Kennedy at the White House. In the early 1960’s Casals made it a practice to conduct the chief choral work of the Casals Festival each year at Carnegie Hall in New York. There, in 1962, he initiated a worldwide peace campaign with the first international performance of his own oratorio El Pesebre (the manger), first performed in 1960. Traditionally, after his Carniegie Hall appearance each year, Casals went to the Marlboro School in Vermont, where he taught master classes and conducted the school’s chamber orchestra as part of the Marlboro Music Festival. In October, 1971, Casals returned to the United Nations to conduct the premiere of his Hymn to the United Nations. Performed to a text by W. H. Auden, this was the high point of the United Nations Day Celebration, and Casals was awarded the United Nations Peace Medal. His other honors included the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom, the French Legion of Honor, the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Gold Medal, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Edinburgh. When in San Juan, Casals continued to work on the Casals Festival and also served as president of the Puerto Rico Conservatory of Music. Only four months before his death in 1973, Casals told a crowd after a New York concert, “I am an old man, but in many senses a young man. And this is what I want you to be, young, young all your life, and to say things to the world that are true.” Two months later, he took part in the festival celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the State of Israel, conducting the Festival Youth Orchestra in a Mozart symphony. Casals was active and happy making music and receiving guests until shortly before his death in San Juan on October 22, 1973.

Significance

Pablo Casals was an artist committed to humanity, and his life as well as his music serves as a source of inspiration to the world. Throughout his long and productive career, Casals used his music to enhance the spirit of international brotherhood in support of his goal of world peace. He held high standards for the world, maintaining an unwavering belief in democracy and human dignity, and refused even to perform in countries that suppressed individual rights through dictatorship. In protest against social and political injustice in his native Spain, Casals lived the latter half of his life in voluntary exile from his homeland.

A man of simplicity and integrity, Casals displayed focused attention that accepted no compromise in musical expression. He demanded much of himself and his musicians, believing that truth and beauty were the artist’s responsibilities. Acclaimed as one of the greatest cellists of all time, Casals expanded the possibilities for cello in both performance and composition, and he is given major credit for international appreciation of this instrument. Probably his greatest influence occurred from 1950 onward, when Casals emerged after years of silence at the first Casals Festival in Prades and exposed an entire younger generation of musicians to interpretation and technique radically different from the sharp, more mechanistic brilliance then established as contemporary performance style.

Bibliography

Corredor, J. M. Conversations with Casals. Translated by André Mangeot. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1956. This 240-page volume of informal conversations with Casals presents his opinions on life and music in a question-and-answer format. Indexed for easy reference, it also includes an introduction by Casals, as well as tributes from people as diverse as Alfred Cortot, Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, Isaac Stern, and Thomas Mann.

Forsee, Aylesa. Pablo Casals: Cellist for Freedom. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965. Written in a manner that is accessible to young people, this biography presents Casals’s life until 1964 and includes a short annotated bibliography.

Gelatt, Roland. Music Makers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963. Reprint. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972. Subtitled “Some Outstanding Musical Performers of Our Day,” this volume includes twenty-one entries on musicians who interested the author and whose careers seemed appropriate for informed comment. The twenty-eight pages on Casals give a chronological overview of his life and work to the early 1950’s, highlighting Casals’s integrity and strength of character.

Kahn, Albert E. Joys and Sorrows: Reflections by Pablo Casals. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1970. This 314-page text grew out of the author’s extended conversations with Casals. Although Kahn has assimilated Casals’s recollections and observations into a first-person narrative written from Casals’s perspective, he emphasizes that it is not intended to be an autobiography. Includes many photographs.

Kenneson, Claude. Musical Prodigies: Perilous Journeys, Remarkable Lives. Portland, Oreg.: Amadeus Press, 1998. This look at more than forty musical prodigies includes the chapter “El Nino del Tost: Pablo Casals.”

Kirk, H. L. Pablo Casals. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1974. For this fascinating and extensive biography, Casals and his wife opened their personal archives to the author. A prime source for those interested in details, it also includes a compilation of Casals’s discography, an extensive bibliography, and many photographic illustrations.

Littlehales, Lillian. Pablo Casals: A Life. 2d ed. London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1949. This pioneer biography, by a cellist friend of Casals and Susan Metcalfe Casals, highlights the holistic and balanced nature of Casals’s personality. Written in 1929 and updated in 1948, it also includes a list of Casals’s recordings.

Nelson, James, ed. Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men of Our Day. New York: W. W. Norton, 1958. This volume includes short conversations with twenty-four eminent men of the mid-twentieth century. Casals’s interview was conducted by a former student, Madeline Foley, in 1955. Although the Casals chapter is only eight pages in length, it allows readers an insightful glimpse of his life.

Taper, Bernard. Cellist in Exile. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962. This tribute offers an intimate portrait of Casals his daily life and work. Beautifully produced, the volume is an expanded version of a 1961 New Yorker profile written from a series of visits with Casals during the 1961 Casals Festival in Puerto Rico.