Music: EI Maestro

“It is like a beautiful woman who has not grown older, but younger with time, more slender, more supple, more graceful.” Thus Pablo Casals once described his cello, an instrument he played with unmatched intelligence, mastery and passion. The analogy to a love affair was apt, for Cellist Casals gave himself to his favorite music (Bach, Mozart) with the sort of evident personal dedication which, as much as his skill, won the world’s reverent respect. Last week admirers by the thousands were gathering to honor him at the annual Casals Festival, this year being held in San Juan, Puerto Rico. But for the first time since the festivals began in Prades, France in 1950, El Maestro was not on hand to greet them.

Six days before the festival was to open, while rehearsing his orchestra in the slow movement of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, Pablo Casals, 80, suffered a coronary thrombosis. Doctors, including Boston’s Paul Dudley White, summoned to Puerto Rico by Governor Luis Munoz Marin, were optimistic about recovery, hoped that with complete rest he might even be able to play and conduct again in the future. But Casals’ friends sadly faced the likelihood that his ‘active career as a musician was over.

That long, extraordinary career began in the small, dusty Catalan town of Vendrell, south of Barcelona, where Casals’ father was a church organist. By the time the boy was eleven, he had mastered the organ, piano and violin and had turned to the cello and the music of Bach (later he was to begin each of his days by playing a few minutes of Bach’s Well Tempered Clavichord). Packed off to Barcelona to study, he played in a gambling casino to support himself. Said one awed casino patron: “He transformed a cage into a concert hall, and a concert hall into a temple.” Eventually, Casals attracted the attention of Spain’s Queen Mother, Maria Cristina. who invited him to play and compose at the court. Britain’s Queen Victoria soon summoned him to London for a command performance. But his early success gave him little contentment. Tormented by the carnage of World War I, he contemplated suicide, finally settled down in the 1920s in Catalonia, where he conducted a first-rate orchestra (“the grandest instrument of them all”).

Pilgrims at Prades. During the Spanish Civil War he was a passionate Loyalist. At war’s end he exiled himself to “the village of Prades (pop. 5,400) in Southern France, where he spent much of his time and money helping refugees from Franco Spain. For a decade the world heard little of Pablo Casals’ music; in 1947 he vowed never to appear in public so long as Franco ruled Spain. When Sir Stafford Cripps invited him to England to explain why Great Britain supported Franco, Casals refused, commented: “He would talk politics; I am talking morals.”

His love for Bach finally brought him out of retirement. In 1950, on the 200th anniversary of Bach’s death, Violinist Alexander Schneider, a Casals protege, persuaded El Maestro to take part in a Bach festival in Prades. From all over the world famed soloists—Joseph Szigeti. Isaac Stern. Rudolf Serkin—poured into the village on the slopes of the Pyrenees to play with the man Fritz Kreisler had called “the best who draws a bow.”

What festival audiences heard was an interpretative style completely at the service of the music, and so lucid and apparently effortless that one frustrated critic left a Casals concert complaining that there was nothing to say. Casals had started developing old laws of cello technique and uncovering new ones when he was still in his teens. Before he was through, he had reshaped the general style of modern cello playing with a brilliant series of methodical innovations. By changes of finger positions, for example, he greatly lightened the work of the left hand and increased its mobility; at the same time he led cellists away from the practice of playing constantly with the full bow and taught them how to achieve a finer control of tone.

Casals’ favorite cello, which he has used for 50 years, was made by 18th century Violinmaker Carlo Bergonzi (he shied away from a Stradivarius on the ground that it had “too much personality”), and on this instrument Casals brought Bach’s unaccompanied suites back into the repertory, uncovered unsuspected dimensions in the sonatas of Beethoven and Brahms, the concertos of Haydn and Schumann.

He played, as one critic remarked, in such a way that every note was either a “forecast” or a “memory.” He was not entirely satisfied with his knowledge of a composition, he once told Philosopher Henri Bergson, until he had a physical feeling of a weight “of the pleasant heaviness of gold” sinking into him.

Publicity in Puerto Rico. After Casals decided last December to move to Puerto Rico, his mother’s birthplace, he was the object of the kind of noisy publicity that he shrank from all his life. The Puerto Rican government set up a Festival Casals Inc., with a $75,000 budget to promote the festival and the nation’s tourist attractions (“Don Pablo, like thousands of visitors, was enchanted with the … sunbathed beaches and industrial plants, the blue Caribbean presenting a background for tropical flora . . .”). A travel agency booked special bargain-rate festival excursions. The concerts quickly sold out, and as of last week scarcely a room was to be had in San Juan.

Through the uproar Casals quietly went about rehearsals, found time to see friends and admirers who thronged to his pink stone suburban beach house (where he lives with his brother’s family). Before his heart attack last week, Casals dispensed advice to an aspiring young conductor (“I hope you will be very well conducted first”), described his perennial stage fright before a public performance (“I don’t like to play in public, but I like to give Puerto Rico what God has given me—my art”), registered a protest at modern music (“Perhaps it is an art made by sounds, but not music”).

Despite his illness, announced the festival committee, the concerts will be held as scheduled, but symphonic and chamber music will be substituted for the solo pieces Casals was to have played. From all over the world telegrams of sympathy poured in. Pianist Rudolf Serkin called on his fellow artists to make the festival “an expression of our love, devotion and gratitude for Casals.” Pablo Casals was characteristically less concerned about himself than about the music he would not be able to play. “What a pity,” he murmured when he woke from a nap under his oxygen tent. “Such a wonderful orchestra.”