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(b Vendrell, 29 Dec 1876; d Puerto Rico, 22 Oct 1973). Catalan cellist and composer. He studied at Barcelona from 1887 and made his début there in 1891. After further study in Madrid and Brussels his international career began in 1899, when he played Lalo's Concerto under Lamoureux in Paris. In 1905 he formed a trio with Thibaud and Cortot, recording works by Schubert and Beethoven. As a soloist Casals was renowned for his beautiful tone and intellectual strength. His playing did much to bring Bach's suites into the repertory. He formed the Orquestra Pau Casals in Barcelona in 1919 but his activities were curtailed by the Spanish Civil War. In 1950 at Prades he returned to music-making and later directed festivals at Perpignan and Puerto Rico. His many pupils included Guilhermina Suggia, with whom he formed a liaison. Casals wrote instrumental works and many choral pieces of a simple, devotional nature.
| Biography: Pablo Casals |
In protest of dictatorships throughout the world, including the totalitarian Francisco Franco regime in Spain, cellist Pablo Casals (1876-1973) refused in 1946 to ever perform on stage again. He eventually returned to playing for audiences but would not perform in countries that supported the Franco government.
From the age of ten, Pablo Casals began each day with a walk, taking inspiration from nature. These outings were always followed by playing two Johann Sebastian Bach preludes and fugues on the piano when he returned home. It was, Casals expressed in Joys and Sorrows: Reflections by Pablo Casals as Told to Albert E. Kahn, "a rediscovery of the world of which I have the joy of being a part. It fills me with an awareness of the wonder of life, with a feeling of the incredible marvel of being a human being." A deeply reflective man, Casals imbued his life with his own spiritual triumvirate: the wonder of nature, the music of Bach, and God. This in turn informed his art. Technically masterful, revolutionary even, his cello playing was elevated by his belief, as he defined it for Kahn, that "music [was] an affirmation of the beauty man was capable of producing."
Casals always felt it his obligation to share with others this access to beauty that transcended languages and borders. When political and egotistical pursuits caused conflicts between his fellow men, however, Casals fought for peace by silencing that beauty. At the height of his artistic prowess he remained in exile, his cello quiet. Nobel Prizewinning writer Thomas Mann, quoted by Bernard Taper in Cellist in Exile: A Portrait of Pablo Casals, believed Casals's art was "allied to a rigid refusal to compromise with wrong, with anything that is morally squalid or offensive to justice."
Casals was born on December 29, 1876, in the seaside town of Vendrell, located in the Catalonian region of Spain. As a child he was surrounded by music. According to H. L. Kirk, author of Pablo Casals: A Biography, "The atmosphere of music cradled Casals's earliest fantasies; much later he spoke of being bathed in it all the time." Casals's father, the local church organist and choirmaster, would play the piano while the infant Casals, barely old enough to walk, would rest his head against the instrument and sing along to the music he felt. By the age of four, Casals was playing the piano. The following year he joined the church choir. A year later he was composing songs with his father, and by the age of nine he had learned how to play the violin and organ.
When he was 11, Casals decided to study the cello after having seen the instrument in a chamber music recital. Though his father wanted him to apprentice to a carpenter, his mother insisted he follow his inclination toward music, enrolling him in the Municipal School of Music in Barcelona, Spain. The young Casals disagreed with the technical constraints advocated by his instructors, preferring to bow and finger the cello in his own manner. His progress was extraordinary, however, and soon Casals's revolutionary techniques had exposed "a range of phrasing, intonation, and expressiveness that had not previously been thought possible, and [made] the cello an instrument of high purpose," Taper noted in Cellist in Exile.
Among those impressed by the ability of the young virtuoso was the Spanish composer and pianist Isaac Albéniz. Upon hearing Casals play in a cafe trio, Albéniz gave him a letter of introduction to Count Guillermo de Morphy, secretary to the Queen Regent of Spain, Maria Cristine. In 1894 Casals traveled to Madrid and gave informal concerts for the queen and her court. Over the next few years, his reputation spread as he played with various orchestras in Paris and Madrid. With his formal debut as a concert soloist in Paris in 1899 - where he appeared with the prestigious orchestra of French conductor Charles Lamoureux - Casals's career was assured.
What audiences heard in Casals's playing was a suffused reverence for everything around him. "I have the idea of God constantly," he declared in McCall's. "I find Him in music. What is that world, what is music but God?" Those feelings were heightened for Casals in nature and in the music of Bach, as he indicated when he continued, explaining his morning ritual: "I go immediately to the sea, and everywhere I see God, in the smallest and largest things. I see Him in colors and designs and forms…. [And] I see God in Bach. Every morning of my life I see nature first, then I see Bach."
Casals's devotion to the music of Bach was no more fully realized than in the Six Suites for solo cello. Sometime in 1890 while browsing through a Barcelona bookstore with his father, Casals found a volume of the suites. The discovery was enlightening. Previously the suites were considered merely musical exercises, but, even at that young age, Casals saw in them something deeper, richer. "How could anyone think of them as being cold, when a whole radiance of space and poetry pours forth from them," he marveled in Joys and Sorrows. "They are the very essence of Bach, and Bach is the very essence of music." Casals studied and practiced the suites every day for a dozen years before he exposed them to the public, and he continued to play at least one suite every day for the rest of his life.
His performance of the suites both shocked and astounded listeners. During the nineteenth-century revival of Bach's music, only the cantatas and the religious works were played in public. It was believed that the solo music for strings had no warmth, no artistic value. With these "exercises," however, "Casals displayed the [German] master as a fully human creator whose art had poetry and passion, accessible to all people," author Kirk stated in Pablo Casals: A Biography. "[Bach], who knows everything and feels everything, cannot write one note, however unimportant it may appear, which is anything but transcendent," Casals stressed to José Maria Corredor in Conversations with Casals. "He has reached the heart of every noble thought, and he has done it in the most perfect way."
Casals's interpretation of the suites, his true testament, came into disfavor after the 1940s when a more historically correct reading of lightness and spontaneity was advanced, in marked contrast to his dramatic renderings. "Almost every movement of the suites, in Casals's hands," William H. Youngren maintained in the Atlantic, "vividly projects the image of a powerful Romantic sensibility engaged in an unceasing, heroic struggle with itself and with the universe." However, in a Strad review of a recent remastering of Casals's performances for compact disc, Tully Potter justified his passionate, ennobling vision: "He builds up great waves of sound and tension, achieving an enormous physical and emotional release towards the end of each one - a Romantic approach, perhaps, but valid here because the player's heart, soul, and sinew are so completely behind every note…. [It is] a spiritual exaltation rare in any performance and still more so on record."
As he approached Bach and music, so did Casals approach life and other people. "The pursuit of music and the love for my neighbors have been inseparable with me, and if the first has brought me the purest and most exalted joys, the second has brought me peace of mind, even in the saddest moments," Casals affirmed to Conversations With Casals's author Corredor. "I am everyday more convinced that the mainspring of any human enterprise must be moral strength and generosity." In 1891, while still in school, Casals came to understand the suffering and inequality of man as he walked among the poor on the streets of Barcelona. He vowed to use his gift from God - his music - for the welfare of his fellow people.
Throughout his career, Casals championed the oppressed and neglected by writing letters and organizing concerts. He refused to perform in countries practicing political tyranny and repression: the Soviet Union in 1917, Germany in 1933, and Italy in 1935. In 1920, for the benefit of the Catalonian people, Casals organized and led the Orquesta Pau Casals, using the Catalonian version of his name. He supported the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, and when Nationalist General Francisco Franco rose to power in 1939, Casals announced he would never return to Spain while Franco was in power. He settled in Prades, France, giving sporadic concerts until 1946 when he renounced the stage altogether. In order to take a stand against dictatorships, Casals vowed never to perform again. As author Kirk put it in Pablo Casals: A Biography, "His withdrawal into silence was the strongest action he felt he could make."
However, in 1950, urged on by friends, Casals resumed conducting and playing, taking part in the Prades Festival organized to celebrate the bicentennial of Bach's death. Though he picked up his cello again, he did not forget his cause - at the end of the festival and every concert he gave after that, Casals played his arrangement of the Catalonian folk ballad "Song of the Birds" as a protest to the continued oppression he saw in Spain.
Casals never returned to Spain. In 1956 he settled in Puerto Rico, his mother's homeland, where he inaugurated the world-famous Casals Festival that spurred artistic and cultural activities on the island, including the founding of a symphony orchestra and a conservatory of music. During the rest of his life, Casals balanced his stand on the issues with his creative impulses. In 1958 he joined his friend, Nobel Prize-winning French philosopher and musicologist Albert Schweitzer, in calling for peace and nuclear disarmament. Casals also spoke and played before the United Nations General Assembly. He appeared before the General Assembly again in 1971, at the age of 95, when he conducted the first performance of his "Hymn of the United Nations."
Though Casals had resumed performing, he refused to play in any country that officially recognized the totalitarian Franco government - as did the United States. Until he died in 1973, Casals did not waver from this position, but for one important exception - in 1961 he performed at the White House at the request of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, a man Casals greatly admired. In Cellist in Exile, Taper quoted Kennedy's introduction of Casals on that day, "The work of all artists - musicians, painters, designers, and architects - stands as a symbol of human freedom, and no one has enriched that freedom more signally than Pablo Casals."
Throughout his life, Casals exalted in the divine presence he found in music and in nature. He also sought to inspire and promote harmony among people, both with his cello and his silence. At his funeral, a recording of "The Song of the Birds" was played. "At that moment," Kirk recounted in Pablo Casals: A Biography. "the noble voice of Pablo Casals's cello commanded pause in the ceremony of the day, a last salutation, eloquent, profound, overwhelming."
Further Reading
Blum, David, Casals and the Art of Interpretation, Holmes &Meier, 1977.
Casals, Pablo, Song of the Birds: Sayings, Stories, and Impressions of Pablo Casals, Robsons Books, 1985.
Casals, Pablo, and Albert E. Kahn, Joys and Sorrows: Reflections by Pablo Casals as Told to Albert E. Kahn, Simon & Schuster, 1970.
Corredor, José Maria, Conversations With Casals, Hutchinson, 1956.
Kirk, H. L., Pablo Casals: A Biography, Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1974.
Littlehales, Lillian, Pablo Casals, Greenwood, 1970.
Quintana, Arturo O., Pablo Casals in Puerto Rico, Gordon Press, 1979.
Taper, Bernard, Cellist in Exile: A Portrait of Pablo Casals, McGraw-Hill, 1962.
American Record Guide, July/August 1991; November/December 1991; January/February 1992; March/April 1992.
Américas, July/August 1985.
Atlantic, November 1981.
McCall's, May 1966.
Musical America, July 1991.
New Yorker, April 19, 1969.
Strad, February 1989; September 1990.
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Pablo (Pau) Casals |
Bibliography
See his memoirs (1970); biography by H. L. Kirk (1974); L. Littlehales, Pablo Casals (rev. ed. 1948).
| Fine Arts Dictionary: Casals, Pablo |
A celebrated twentieth-century Spanish cellist (see cello). After Francisco Franco came to power in Spain, Casals went into exile in France and later moved to Puerto Rico. He gave a famous performance at the White House in 1961.
| Quotes By: Pablo Casals |
Quotes:
"Each person has inside a basic decency and goodness. If he listens to it and acts on it, he is giving a great deal of what it is the world needs most. It is not complicated but it takes courage. It takes courage for a person to listen to his own goodness and act on it."
"We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree, and the tree is all humanity. We cannot live without the others, without the tree."
"Let us not forget that the greatest composers were also the greatest thieves. They stole from everyone and everywhere."
"The first thing to do in life is to do with purpose what one purposes to do."
"To retire is to die."
"I feel the capacity to care is the thing which gives life its deepest significance."
See more famous quotes by
Pablo Casals
| Artist: Pablo Casals |
| Discography: Pablo Casals |
| Wikipedia: Pablo Casals |
| Pau Casals | |
|---|---|
| Background information | |
| Birth name | Pau Casals i Defilló |
| Born | December 29, 1876 El Vendrell, Catalonia, Spain |
| Died | October 22, 1973 (aged 96) San Juan, Puerto Rico |
| Genres | Classical |
| Occupations | Cellist, conductor, pedagogue |
| Instruments | Cello |
| Years active | 1891-1973 |
| Notable instruments | |
| Cello Matteo Goffriller 1700 Matteo Goffriller 1710 Carlo Tononi 1730 |
|
Pau Casals i Defilló (December 29, 1876 – October 22, 1973), best known during his professional career as Pablo Casals,[1][2][3] was a Spanish Catalan cellist and later conductor. He made many recordings throughout his career, of solo, chamber, and orchestral music, also as conductor, but Casals is perhaps best remembered for the recording of the Bach Cello Suites he made from 1936 to 1939.
Casals was an ardent supporter of the Spanish Republican government. After its defeat in 1939, Casals vowed not to return to Spain until democracy had been restored, although he did not live to see the end of the Franco dictatorial regime.
Contents |
Casals was born in El Vendrell, Catalonia, Spain. His father, Carles Casals i Ribes (1852-1908), was a parish organist and choirmaster. He gave Casals instruction in piano, violin, and organ. He was also a very strict disciplinarian. When Casals was young his father would pull the piano out from the wall and have him and his brother, Enrique, stand behind it and name the notes and the scales that his father was playing. At age four Casals could play the violin, piano and flute. When Casals was eleven, he first heard the cello performed by a group of traveling musicians, and decided to dedicate himself to the instrument.
In 1888 his mother, Pilar Defilló de Casals, who was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico of Catalonian ancestry, took him to Barcelona, where he enrolled in the Escola Municipal de Música.[4] There he studied cello, theory, and piano. He made prodigious progress as a cellist; on February 23, 1891 he gave a solo recital in Barcelona at the age of fourteen. He graduated from the Escola with honours two years later.
In 1893, the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz heard him playing in a trio in a café and gave him a letter of introduction to the private secretary to María Cristina, the Queen Regent, in Madrid, Spain. Casals was asked to play at informal concerts in the palace, and was granted a royal stipend to study composition at the Conservatorio de Música y Declamación in Madrid with Víctor Mirecki. He also played in the newly organized Quartet Society.
In 1895 he went to Paris, where, having lost his stipend from Catalonia, he earned a living by playing second cello in the theater orchestra of the Folies Marigny. In 1896, he returned to Catalonia and received an appointment to the faculty of the Escola Municipal de Música in Barcelona. He was also appointed principal cellist in the orchestra of Barcelona's opera house, the Liceu. In 1897 he appeared as soloist with the Madrid Symphony Orchestra, and was awarded the Order of Carlos III from the Queen.
In 1899, Casals played at The Crystal Palace in London, and later for Queen Victoria at Osborne House, her summer residence, accompanied by Ernest Walker. On November 12 and December 17, 1899, he appeared as a soloist at Lamoureux Concerts in Paris, to great public and critical acclaim. He toured Spain and the Netherlands with the pianist Harold Bauer in 1900-1901; in 1901-1902 he made his first tour of the United States; and in 1903 toured South America.
On January 15, 1904, Casals was invited to play at the White House for President Theodore Roosevelt. On March 9 of that year he made his debut at Carnegie Hall in New York, playing Richard Strauss's Don Quixote under the baton of the composer. In 1906 he became associated with the talented young Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia,[5] who studied with him and began to appear in concerts as Mme. P. Casals-Suggia, although they were not legally married. Their relationship ended in 1912.
The New York Times of April 9, 1911 announced that Pablo Casals would perform at the London Musical Festival to be held at the Queen's Hall on the second day of the Festival (May 23). The piece chosen was Haydn's Cello Concerto in D and Casals would later join Fritz Kreisler for Brahms's Double Concerto for Violin and Cello.[2]
In 1914 Casals married the American socialite and singer Susan Metcalfe; they were separated in 1928, but did not divorce until 1957.
Although Casals made his first recordings in 1915 (a series for Columbia), it would not be until 1926 that he again released a recording (on the Victor label).[3]
Back in Paris, Casals organized a trio with the pianist Alfred Cortot and the violinist Jacques Thibaud; they played concerts and made recordings until 1937. Casals also became interested in conducting, and in 1919 he organized, in Barcelona, the Orquesta Pau Casals and led its first concert on October 13, 1920. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the Orquesta Pau Casals ceased its activities.
Casals was an ardent supporter of the Spanish Republican government, and after its defeat vowed not to return to Spain until democracy was restored. Casals performed at the Gran Teatro del Liceo on October 19, 1938, possibly his last performance in Spain before his exile.[6]
He settled in the French village of Prada de Conflent, on the Spanish frontier; between 1939 and 1942 he made sporadic appearances as a cellist in the unoccupied zone of southern France and in Switzerland. So fierce was his opposition to the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco in Spain that he refused to appear in countries that recognized the authoritarian Spanish government. He made a notable exception when he took part in a concert of chamber music in the White House on November 13, 1961, at the invitation of President John F. Kennedy, whom he admired. On December 6, 1963, Casals was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom.[7]
Throughout most of his professional career, he played on a cello that was labeled and attributed to "Carlo Tononi ... 1733" but after playing it for 50 years it was discovered to have been created by the Venetian luthier, Matteo Goffriller around 1700. It was acquired by Casals in 1913.[8]
In 1950 he resumed his career as conductor and cellist at the Prades Festival in Conflent, organized in commemoration of the bicentenary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach; Casals agreed to participate on condition that all proceeds were to go to a refugee hospital in nearby Perpignan.[3]
In 1952, Casals met Marta Montañez Martínez, a young Puerto Rican student who had gone to Spain to participate in the Festival. Casals was very impressed with her and encouraged her to return to Mannes College of Music in New York to continue her studies.
He continued leading the Prades Festivals until 1966.
Casals first traveled to Puerto Rico in 1955, inaugurating the annual Casals Festival the next year. On August 3, 1957, at 80, Casals married Marta Montañez. They made their permanent residence in the town of Ceiba, and lived in a house called "El Pesebre" (The Manger).[9]
Casals made an impact in the Puerto Rican music scene, by founding the Puerto Rico Symphonic Orchestra in 1958, and the Musical Conservatory of Puerto Rico in 1959.
In the 1960s, Casals gave many master classes throughout the world in places such as Zermatt, Tuscany, Berkeley, and Marlboro. Several of these events were televised.
In 1961, he performed at the White House by invitation of President Kennedy. This performance was recorded and released as an album.
Casals was also a composer. Perhaps his most effective work is La Sardana, for an ensemble of cellos, which he composed in 1926. His oratorio El Pesebre was performed for the first time in Acapulco, Mexico, on December 17, 1960. He also presented it to the United Nations during their anniversary in 1963.
One of his last compositions was the Himne a les Nacions Unides (Hymn of the United Nations); he conducted its first performance in a special concert at the United Nations on October 24, 1971, two months before his 95th birthday.
Casals' memoirs were taken down by Albert E. Kahn, and published as Joys and Sorrows: Pablo Casals, His Own Story (1970).
Casals died in 1973 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, at the age of 96 and was buried at the Puerto Rico National Cemetery. He did not live to see the end of the Franco dictatorial regime, but he was posthumously honoured by the Spanish government under King Juan Carlos I which, in 1976, issued a commemorative postage stamp to Pau Casals in honour of the centenary of his birth.[10] In 1979 his remains were laid to rest in his hometown of El Vendrell, Catalonia.
In 1989, Casals was posthumously awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.[11]
The International Pau Casals Cello Competition is held in Germany under the auspices of the Kronberg Academy once every four years, starting in 2000, in order to discover and further the careers of the future cello elite, and is supported by the Pau Casals Foundation, under the patronage of Marta Casals Istomin. One of the prizes is the use of one of the Gofriller cellos owned by Casals.
The first top prize was awarded in 2000 to Claudio Bohórquez.
American comedian George Carlin, in his interview for the Archive of American Television, refers to Casals when discussing the restless nature of an artist's persona. As Carlin states, when Casals (then age 93) was asked why he continued to practice the cello three hours a day, Casals replied "I'm beginning to notice some improvement." Carlin continues, "And that's the thing that's in me. I notice myself getting better at this."
In Puerto Rico, the Casals Festival is still celebrated annually. There is also a museum dedicated to the life of Casals located in Old San Juan.
On October 3, 2009 Sala Sinfonica Pablo Casals, a new symphony hall named in Casals’ honor, opened in San Juan, PR. The $34 million building, designed by Rodolfo Fernandez, is the latest addition to the Centro de Bellas Artes complex. It is the new home of the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra. Acentech Incorporated's Studio A served as acoustical consultant for architectural acoustics and sound system design of the hall[12].
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The cello is like a beautiful woman who has not grown older, but younger with time, more slender, more supple, more graceful.

- cellist Pablo Casals