The White House: An Evening with Casals

After-dinner musicales in the East Room of the White House have been rather distressing in recent years. During the Eisenhower occupancy there were the schmalzy tunes of Hildegarde and Lawrence Welk. Before that, Oscar Levant played for company, but in the family circle there were the shaky soprano of Margaret Truman and her father’s ricki-tick piano. Going back to the F.D.R. years, there was Kate Smith. Last week the Kennedys changed all that, with an evening of chamber music that sent shards of rapture through the world of serious music.

Country Cousins. The evening was right out of the 18th century: it might almost have been a concert led by Haydn at the court of the Esterhazys or a command performance by C.P.E. Bach for Frederick the Great. The assemblage of 153 guests was celebrated and varied. Not a single blue-ribbon American composer of serious music, from Aaron Copland to Alan Hovhannes, was missing from the guest list. The nation’s leading conductors —Bernstein, Ormandy, Stokowski—were represented in white tie and tails, and all of the major music critics of New York and Washington were eagerly present. Said one: “The composers acted and talked like poor country cousins who had at last been let in the front door.”

Also among the guests were some of the nation’s leading patrons of music: Anthony A. Bliss, president of the Metropolitan Opera Association; Henry Ford II, an angel of the Detroit Symphony; IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Jr.,* and Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, who solved the Met’s union contract impasse (TIME, Sept. 8). The grandes dames were out in force—Rose Kennedy, the President’s mother; the Castoria heiress Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss, and the indomitable Alice Roosevelt Longworth—along with such assorted guests from other fields as Pundit Walter Lippmann, Labor Chief George Meany, Oilman Edwin Pauley, and New York’s Mayor Robert Wagner (who played the fiddle as a boy). And, since the party was in honor of Governor Luis Muňoz Marin and his wife, there was a sprinkling of Puerto Ricans, including Mayoress Doňa Felisa Rincón de Gautier of San Juan.

The man they came to see and hear was 84-year-old Cellist Pablo Casals, one of the world’s greatest performing musicians. Since his self-banishment from his native Spain in 1939, Casals has refused to fiddle publicly in any country that recognizes the Franco government,* but, as Muňoz Marin put it, he agreed to play at the White House “to render the homage of music to the great leader whom he admires.”

The evening started with the President presiding over half the guests at a dinner in the State Dining Room, while Jackie was hostess to the others in the Blue Room. There were some Melachrino echoes of the past: the Air Force Strolling Strings (20 wall-to-wall violinists and a harpist) playing Victor Herbert dinner music. Then, after dinner, everyone repaired to the East Room, and the tone and tempo changed abruptly. Casals and his noted colleagues, Violinist Alexander Schneider and Pianist Mieczyslaw Horszowski, had decided to forgo the dinner in favor of a short rest and a warm-up rehearsal. They had also ignored the formal order of the night, appeared in black tie because Casals is uncomfortable playing in tails.

After the guests had taken their chairs, Casals bent over his 250-year-old Goffriller violoncello and, with a characteristic grimace, began to draw out the golden notes of Mendelssohn’s Trio in D Minor. Then there were Schumann’s fluid Adagio and Allegro and five Concert Pieces by Couperin. As an encore, Casals played his own arrangement—virtually his theme song—of the Catalan melody, Chant of the Birds.

The musicale was a wondrous success. With ears turned intently to the aged master, the critics and music lovers agreed that Casals had never made better music, and that his octogenarian bow arm was as firm as ever. At concert’s end, the audience arose in a standing ovation. The President gave Casals an abrazo and summoned Alice Longworth to the front of the room for a bow. She had heard the great cellist in his last White House performance, 57 years before, when he played for her President father Theodore Roosevelt.

Emotional Flood. The eminent musicians in the audience were staggered by the emotion of it all. Said Composer Gian Carlo Menotti: “Nowhere in Europe could you have an evening like this. English royalty entertains movie stars. Our President entertains artists.” Obbligatoed Eugene Ormandy: “An inspiration to all of us.” Leonard Bernstein, who sat with his head buried in his hands during most of the recital, was nearly overcome. “I was deeply moved by the entire occasion,” he admitted, “not merely by the music of Casals but by the company in which it was played.” Maestro Casals was the calmest of all. His laconic comment: “It went well.”

*Longtime Monday-night holder, as was his late father, of the Metropolitan Opera’s Box 35 —the best seat in the house—at a cost of $2,000 per season. *Exceptions: the annual summer seminars at Rudolf Serkin’s summer quarters in Vermont, the Casals festivals in Puerto Rico each year, and past festivals in Prades and Perpignan, France.