Remembering Pau Casals

The first Cata­lan name I ever (know­ingly) heard was that of Pau Casals. I was around eight years old and lis­ten­ing to a Monty Python com­edy record.

An Eng­lish mock-com­men­ta­tor’s voice in­tro­duced “The Sonatino in E sharp by An­to­nio Vi­valdi to be played by Pablo Casals dur­ing his 400 foot plunge into a bucket of boil­ing fat.” Next was the sound of a vi­o­lin soloist play­ing a few bars, then a long scream fol­lowed by the sound you’d ex­pect of some­one falling through the air into a con­tainer of liq­uid.

This was very funny as a kid but, in fact, Casals was mainly a cello player and so much of this man’s life, his be­liefs and prac­tices, make Monty Python’s com­edy sketches seem tame and dull in com­par­i­son.

Pau Casal’s mother Pilar (who was orig­i­nally from Puerto Rico) had brought him up to treat every­one as an equal. He claims she openly breast­fed his baby brother in front of the Span­ish in­fanta (the sis­ter of the king) on their first day at the royal palace in Madrid. The young cel­list had gone there to au­di­tion for a schol­ar­ship from the queen but it turned out to be barely enough for the fam­ily of four to live on.

Flu­ent in seven lan­guages, Casals be­came a pub­lic friend to many well-known fig­ures in the arts, in­clud­ing Colonel George Pi­cart, a hero of the in­fa­mous, anti-se­mitic Drey­fus case in Paris at the turn of the cen­tury.

Casals was full of con­tra­dic­tions, too. Ad­ven­tur­ous by na­ture, he was also a crea­ture of habit. He started more than 80 years of his life every day play­ing two pre­ludes and fugues by Bach but some­how found new vi­tal­ity in him­self and the music every time he did so.

Rightly though, it is his mu­si­cal ge­nius that he is still re­mem­bered for.

His be­lief that in­tu­ition or in­stinct is the most im­por­tant fac­tor in the cre­ation and per­for­mance of music was not then a pop­u­lar opin­ion. He was also con­tro­ver­sial in his de­vel­op­ment of rad­i­cal meth­ods of using his main in­stru­ment but un­der­stood the fun­da­men­tal im­por­tance of “play­ing songs in the lan­guage of every­one.”

Lis­ten­ing to his in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the old Cata­lan folk song (Casals says it is ac­tu­ally a Christ­mas carol) ‘El Cant del Ocells’, or Song of the Birds, brought tears flood­ing into my eyes and tugged at my heart strings in the first hand­ful of notes he played. He seems to have the abil­ity to drag you under the waves for a few wrench­ing sec­onds then within a few beats, thrust you up, blink­ing hard into the warmth of the sun.

My only crit­i­cism of this ex­tra­or­di­nary man (who was also an ac­com­plished or­ches­tra con­duc­tor) is his men­tal and emo­tional blindspot to­wards the monar­chy. Casals called him­self a life-long Re­pub­li­can but his con­tin­u­ally fawn­ing at­ti­tude to­wards them was at odds with his stated at­ti­tude.

While he un­der­stand­ably felt in­debted to the Span­ish roy­als for early op­por­tu­ni­ties in his ca­reer, it seems to me that in his au­to­bi­og­ra­phy ‘Joys & Sor­rows’ he ex­ag­ger­ated the “friend­ship” he had with King Al­fonso XIII and Queen Maria Cristina who, as his sup­posed “sec­ond mother”, gave him dec­o­ra­tive ho­n­ours and jew­els. Casals failed to state that their riches and po­si­tion came at the ex­pense of or­di­nary peo­ple such as his own fam­ily.

Just like his name Pau, Casals was es­sen­tially an in­ter­na­tional man of peace. Surely, this is partly be­cause three major wars strad­dled his life, the same way he strad­dled the cello. He once said: “The love of one’s coun­try is a splen­did thing. But why should love stop at the bor­der?” These are still im­por­tant sen­ti­ments today, al­most half a cen­tury after his death.